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On Wed, 27 Nov 1996, Bradley W Bateman wrote: 
 
> I also think that an enormous amount of Whig history of thought has been 
> published that falls under Ross's point b: by people who are on the 
> "losing end" of the theeoretical debate in the last three decades 
> and who have gravitated to the "history of thought" as a place where 
> they can try to back up and show where and when their side should have 
> won. One finds this kind of "history" done by virtually every heterodox 
> school of thought; "histories" of this sort are published in the journals 
> of the dissenting groups and in mainstream journals by the leading lights 
> of these groups. But while I have  sympathy with some of these 
> schools, I find the "history" they do to be poor history at best. 
> It is this kind of work that I think can be appropriately termed 
> both Whiggish and internal; it argues from narrow point of view 
> (whose equations are right) and focuses on the equations and their 
> derivation to the virtual exclusion of everything else. People can't be 
> stopped from doing this kind of work, but I wish they wouldn't call 
> it history. It certainly rarely qualifies. 
> 
 
 
This echoes comments by Tony Brewer that I've lost that allude to 
Whiggish history done by "Marxians and Sraffians". What I find odd about 
this is that if I were to pick an achievement in the history of 
economic thought in this century that did the sort of thing Quentin 
Skinner thinks ought to be done (surely Skinner's work lies behind both 
Roy's and Ross's methodological dicta)--i.e. that works to create enough 
context for us to see that the thinker we thought was groping towards 
"modern" neo-classical truth was actually engaged in a completely 
different endeavor, speaking a different language, in a different "world" 
therefore, in the Kuhnian sense--I would be hard-pressed to find a better 
example than Sraffa's work on Ricardo. This was the very opposite of whig 
history, surely? Moreover, it was certainly not the case here that Sraffa 
was reading back into history the "classical" paradigm he presents in 
*Production of Commodities*---the relationship was exactly the reverse: 
the reinterpretation of Ricardo drove the theoretical work. 
 
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