------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (January 2006)
Warren J. Samuels, Willie Henderson, Kirk D. Johnson and Marianne
Johnson, editors, _Essays on the History of Economics_. New York:
Routledge, 2004. xiii + 340 pp. $165 (cloth), ISBN: 0-415-70006-X.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Maria Pia Paganelli, Department of Economics,
Yeshiva University.
The unifying theme of _Essays on the History of Economics_ may not be
obvious from simply looking at its table of contents. The volume has
four essays. Willie Henderson and Warren Samuels write on "The
Etiology of Adam Smith's Division of Labor: Alternative Accounts and
Smith's Methodology Applied to Them" with an appendix by Henderson on
"How Does Smith Achieve a Synthesis in Writing? Evidence from His
Propensity to Truck, Barter and Exchange." Warren Samuels, Kirk D.
Johnson and Marianne Johnson write the second essay, titled "Should
History-of-Economic-Thought Textbooks Cover 'Recent' Economic
Thought?" as well as the third essay, "What the Authors of
History-of-Economic-Thought Textbooks Say about the History of
Economics." The last essay is a solo by Samuels on "Thorstein Veblen
as Economic Theorist."
What connects these four essays is summarized by Samuels in the
introduction: "If John R. Hicks is correct that no one theory can
answer all our questions, then perhaps there is room for multiple
theories of capital, of cost, and so on, each devoted to inquiring
into different questions. As it stands, most economists seem
compelled to believe that only one correct theory of capital or of
cost, etc. can exist and then adopt their favorite one -- all the
while using it as a tool or element of design strategy. Historians of
economic thought can enrich economic theory by educating future
economists along the lines of theoretical pluralism" (p. 6).
If a goal of history of economic thought is to show that economics
and its history is not a monolith, but rather a discipline with a
plurality of socially constructed theories and concepts, this is a
successful work of history of economic thought.
The first essay deals with the plurality of interpretations of Adam
Smith's sources of the division of labor. Through a meticulous
textual analysis, the authors show that in addition to the
oft-mentioned propensity to truck, barter and exchange and reason and
speech, four additional sources for the division of labor can be
argued for. Division of labor may emerge because individuals take
advantage of opportunities, because of the presence of a commercial
society, because of the "nature of human nature" or because of human
desire for approbation. The interpretative conflicts and paradoxes
associated with the language are numerous.
The second essay is explicitly meant to challenge Joseph Dorfman's
answer to the question: Where does history of economic thought end?
In _The Economic Mind in American Civilization_ (1959) Dorfman claims
that time must pass for us to gain knowledge and perspective. The
authors show that history of economic thought is able to handle
recency in a more variegated way than Dorfman is willing to admit.
The authors go though 73 textbooks in their various editions (a total
of 124 textbooks) to see how recency is handled. They report for each
whether the problem of recency is explicitly discussed, how the
design changed over the years to account for recent materials, the
extent of coverage of recent materials, and the frequency of
citations and references to prominent post-war economists. The
results are mixed: there is no clear end of history of economic
thought, which contradicts Dorfman's rule, and supports the idea of
pluralism in the history of economic thought. Dealing with recency
may reduce the risks of a history written by the survivors or by the
winners. Also, the multitude of histories of economic thought seems
to dispute Dorfman's assertion that the one correct story will be
revealed with the full knowledge generated by the passage of time.
Another conclusion from this chapter seems a challenge to trained
historians of economic thought: "most of recent
history-of-economic-thought work is undertaken by economists (and
others) who are not historians of economic thought" (p. 179) through
survey articles, literature reviews, specialized encyclopedias,
biographies and the like. Pluralism in the discipline comes also from
the diversity of writers of the history of the discipline.
The third essay reports the historiographic position of 63 textbooks.
It successfully shows that "the history of economic thought does not
write itself" (p. 264) but is filtered through the interpretive eyes
of the textbook writer. By analyzing the design strategies of the
textbooks, this chapter is a testimony to the pluralism of the
discipline. The diversity of interpretations is visible in the choice
of starting and ending time, in the individuals and schools covered,
and especially in the focus on theories or on ideas. The work
presented seems immense, as for each historiographic question there
is a list of authors who provide an answer and the answer itself.
Given the amount of information presented, it seems like an
electronic version of this chapter, with the option of electronically
searching it, would be useful as a working tool for a scholar
interested in this kind of research.
The last essay challenges the hegemony of neoclassical economics in
defining theory. The interpretation of the work of Thorstein Veblen
is used to demonstrate the limits of such supremacy. The same author
(Veblen) can be interpreted as an anti-theorist as well as a
theorist, depending on how theory is defined. If by theory we
understand only neoclassical theory, a la Blaug, then Veblen is an
anti-theorist and offers no theory. By expanding the definition of
theory to include non-neoclassical theories, Veblen is a theorist (a
non-neoclassical one) and is not anti-theory (while he is
anti-neoclassical).
The volume is an immense work of scholarship, as shown by the rich
twenty-five pages of bibliography. It is a dense picture of the state
of the discipline today, a picture that shows a dynamic cacophony of
different voices, rather than a unified but maybe more monotonous
tune.
Maria Pia Paganelli is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yeshiva
University. She works on eighteenth-century money theories and on
Adam Smith.
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