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History of Thought: In Search of the Missing Adjective 
 
Tim Alborn 
Department of History 
Harvard University 
 
A few months ago several members of this list (Brad Bateman, Anthony 
Brewer, Ross Emmett, et al.) contributed several suggestions as to why 
historians of economics should pay more attention to more general topics 
in intellectual and cultural history, both in terms of subject matter and 
methodology.  I'd like to use this editorial to return to this theme from 
a somewhat different perspective. I'll be borrowing from a paper which is 
forthcoming in the next special edition of HOPE (Alborn 1997).  I 
apologize in advance for those who have heard some of this before, and I 
urge those who haven't to consult the issue when it comes out for more 
details. 
 
I want to start by considering, from my "outsider's perspective" (I'm 
trained as a historian of science and I teach in a history department), 
how odd it is to hear for the first time an economist talk of "the history 
of thought", only to realize gradually the presence of the silent--and for 
them, apparently redundant--adjective "economic".  Whenever I tell my 
friends with history Ph.D.s about this, they are either puzzled, or, if 
they know something about economists, bemused.  This informal 
identification of all thought with their own chosen subject bears obvious 
relevance to the reluctance, on the part of some historians of economics, 
to venture too far beyond their own discipline's historiography.  It also 
speaks to what is, to me, a troubling sort of insularity, which (as Brad 
Bateman suggested) is only productive up to a point. 
 
Why should historians of economics not be insular?  In my HOPE article I 
address this question from two perspectives: one deriving from recent 
critiques within history and literary criticism of such stalwart 
categories as "class" and "culture"; the other from my research on 
late-nineteenth century British financial journalism.  For the sake of 
brevity, I'll mention only one of the two historiographical examples I use 
in my paper (for the other see Herbert 1991), and I'll just sketch in 
general terms my argument about financial journalism. 
 
My example from historiography concerns a recent debate among historians 
on the meaning and significance of "class" as a category for writing the 
social history of nineteenth-century Britain.  Out of this debate a 
consensus has emerged that "class" needs to be historicized, that 
is, traced back to the times and places when people actually used the 
term.  Gareth Stedman Jones (1983) has done this for "working class" and, 
more recently, Dror Wahrman (1995)  has done much the same thing for 
"middle class".  The aim in both cases was to avoid imposing an 
anachronistic category (derived from late-nineteenth century Marxism or 
20th-century sociology) onto historical analysis--and in the process, to 
learn something important about how people in the nineteenth century 
defined their own social boundaries.  Responding to such work, the 
historian Patrick Joyce has recently suggested in his book _Visions of the 
People_ (1991) that "class" itself is a misleading, if not marginal, 
construct for historians to be examining.  He argues that most people in 
nineteenth-century Britain, especially those who are typically referred to 
as belonging to the "working class", more often  employed social 
categories like "the people" which suggest that national and regional 
identities were far more common than "class" as an identifier at the 
time.  More generally, he suggests that historians who are interested in 
language should pay attention to hitherto under-analysed sources like 
dialect literature and ballads, which often had far greater currency than 
(e.g.) socialist pamphlets--and which, in any case, provide a crucial 
context for those interested in seeing how "class" was used and received 
in the nineteenth century. 
 
What does this debate have to do with history of economics?  I would argue 
that the adjective "economic", like "class", often conceals more than it 
explains when sought in a pre-1900 setting.   Both of the strategies 
mentioned above come in useful here: spending more time trying to figure 
out what "economic" meant to people like Adam Smith and W.S. Jevons when 
they used the term; and spending more time examining sources in which the 
usual key words of the history of economic thought -- wages fund, marginal 
utility, etc.--were relevant, but not at the center of the discourse.  I 
took the case of the presentation of economic information in _The 
Economist_  
between 1860 and 1880 and somewhat akin to the dialect almanacs and 
broadside ballads Joyce discusses in _Visions of the People_.  This 
newspaper, after all, was calling itself an "economist" when most of its 
contemporaries who would later make an appearance in HOPE were still 
unsure about what to call themselves.  Its first two editors, James Wilson 
and Walter Bagehot, betrayed notably mixed feelings about the 
treatise-writers like Mill and Cairnes.  They published these men's 
correspondence and praised their books, but at the same time harbored 
doubts about the relevance of their abtract principles to the real world. 
Their evaluation, in short, was not all that different from the 
perspective of many financial journals today regarding academic economics. 
 
The ambivalence worked both ways.  Economists like Jevons and Marshall 
wavered between supporting and distrusting the economic information which 
journals like the _Economist_ provided on a weekly basis (on this see, 
e.g., Maloney 1985, Whittaker 1972). Their ambivalence can be accounted 
for when one considers the timing: economic methodology was at a 
precarious crossroads in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, 
between claiming the potential for full empirical confirmation of the new 
mathematical theories and valuing the formal rigor of such theories to the 
point of disregarding any data which might come their way (see Mirowski 
1989). The dilemma can also be posed in terms of the ideological content 
of neoclassical economics.  For the theory to work, it was important to 
secure a minimum of government intervention and/or monopoly capitalism. 
To gain access to the data which was needed to confirm the theory (which  
was important as long as economists insisted on the potential for 
empirical confirmation), it was necessary to interfere with the "natural" 
workings of the market.  The best market generated nothing but private 
information; the best set of information was apparently generated by  
bureaucratic socialism. 
 
This dilemma is evident in the early years of _The Economist_, when the 
paper tried to combine its original mission as a free-market propaganda 
organ with the practical service of providing vast amounts of useful 
economic data.  The newspaper resolved this problem by providing the 
information it could get its hands on--typically from the Board of Trade, 
foreign statistical bureaus, and public companies--and emphasizing at 
every turn that better information was out there, but it was (fortunately) 
in the private possession of capitalists.  The reason the British economy 
worked so well was the same reason why the facts in the _Economist_ were 
necessarily imperfect and incomplete.  By the end of the nineteenth 
century the _Economist_ became much more closely allied to the interests 
of financial elites in London, and consequently less interested in 
defending a free-market utopia at every opportunity.  As company reports 
came to dominate its editorial columns and advertising sections, this 
data--supplemented by government-supervised audits and statistics--came to 
"speak for themselves."  No longer did the paper bother to suggest that 
the information they were peddling was, fortunately for England, 
second-best. 
 
Significantly, it was not until Keynes that British economists would take 
an equivalent stance on the proper relationship between economic theory 
and economic information.  The persistance, on the part of economists like 
Jevons and Marshall, to maintain the need for better economic data at the 
same time as they were worrying about the ramifications of large-scale 
companies and government intervention, goes a long way to account for 
their suspicions that newspapers like the _Economist_ were not the best 
possible source of that data.  With these suspicions, an important wedge 
appeared between what economists and what the wider reading public meant 
by "economic".  The adjective, from that time onward, would have at least 
two very different meanings, which in subsequent years have only 
intermittently reconverged.  Historians who purport to study economic 
thought, especially those who leave the adjective out, would do well to 
consider the times and places (both past and present) when "economic" has 
come to mean different things to different people. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
T.L. Alborn, "Persuading by the Numbers: The Balance Sheet in 
Late-Victorian Financial Journalism," forthcoming in John Davis, ed., _New 
Economics and Its Writing_ (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997). 
 
C. Herbert, _Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the 
Nineteenth Century_ (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991). 
 
G.S. Jones, _Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 
1832-1982_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. press, 1983). 
 
P. Joyce,  _Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of 
Class, 1848-1914_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991). 
 
J. Maloney, _Marshall, Orthodoxy and the Professionalisation of Economics_ 
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. press, 1985). 
 
P. Mirowski, _More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics: Physics 
as Nature's Economics_ (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). 
 
D. Wahrman, _Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of 
Class in Britain c. 1780-1840_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 
1995). 
 
J.K. Whitaker, "Alfred Marshall: The Years of 1877 to 1885," _HOPE_ 4 
(1972). 
 
 
 
 
 
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