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In a recent book review on EH Net  
 
[http://www.eh.net/lists/archives/hes/dec-2003/0040.php] 
 
Esther-Mirjam Sent referred to the discussion about thin and thick 
histories that Roy Weintraub, I, and others recently participated in. In it 
she relates thin history to "conventional exegesis" and also equates a thin 
history approach to a rational reconstruction approach. She then relates 
that approach to a Whiggish perspective in which "the theory from one 
school could be extracted, without much violence, from the author's body of 
thought, its underpinning vision, and its environmental context." She then 
continues: "What Nicola Giocoli offers ... is thin history, or rational 
reconstruction. Ignoring historical contingencies, personal vicissitudes, 
academic relations, funding availability, and so on, he focuses almost 
exclusively on written texts." 
 
I'm not sure what "rational reconstruction" is but I am sure that what she 
is calling thin history is not what I meant by thin history. I have long 
been an advocate of using as broad a set of information sources as 
possible. (See my "Form and Content in the History of Economic Thought" 
reprinting in my Why Aren't Economists as Important as Garbagemen book, in 
which I specifically argued that historians of recent economic thought 
needed to use interviews and surveys rather than just exegesis, and needed 
to talk about academic relations, funding, and the larger context. I was 
using those alternative approaches back in the early 1980s when it was seen 
as a radical departure from what was previously done. (When Arjo Klamer and 
I interviewed graduate students in the 1980s for "The Making of An 
Economist" we were accused of being sociologists. This past year, as I have 
updated it, I heard no such accusations.)  
 
Thin histories, to me, are simply histories written by economists who want 
to remain economists, and not become historians, philosophers, or something 
else. I'd love to do thick histories, but I can't and still keep up with 
what's happening in economics. So I do thin histories. In those histories I 
try to add vision that I think is often lacking in many thick economists' 
work, but I see myself working with them, not against them. I am just an 
economist who is focusing on issues somewhat different from the ones they 
are focusing on. Consistent with that approach I bounce my ideas off my 
economist friends, and modify my ideas as I discuss their work, and my 
interpretation of their work, with them. It is collaborative work. For 
example, I'm currently organizing a conference here at Middlebury on the 
future of macro. We have top macro researchers using new techniques 
discussing their approach and how it might change the way macro is done.  
 
It is my belief that an economist can bring a deeper sense of economists 
and economics to a study of economics than can a non-economist, and thus 
there is some advantage to having an economist do a thin history, even if 
he or she doesn't have all the tools of a historian or a sociologist. An 
academic economist has a feel for the way the academic system works, and, 
if he or she can capture that, he or she can convey the vision of an 
economist much better than can someone doing a thick history who is not 
trained in economics. Clearly, it would be better to be trained in 
everything, but that's generally not possible. My point is that "good" 
history of thought-whether thick or thin--uses whatever tools available and 
really tries to get into the vision of the author. Esther-Mirjam's 
characterization of thin history misses that sense, and seems to equate 
thin history with narrow-minded and unimaginative history. Such history is 
just bad history; it's not thin of thick history.  
 
An example of where I believe a thick history can go wrong is a book I 
recently read by S. M Amadae entitled Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: 
The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. The author is in 
History of Science and Technology Program and is using in what I believe 
would be described at a "thick history' approach. He does all the usual 
things thick historians seem to like-he relates a number of different 
approaches-economics, public and social choice theory, and political 
science and finds a Rand connection-something that seems to be de rigueur 
for Science and Technology histories. 
  
The problem for me with the book is that it doesn't get the story right 
because it doesn't really capture my sense of the academic economist's 
approach. The author sees the development of rational choice as a 
deliberately chosen tool-chosen by what he calls scholar warriors-to fight 
socialism and defend capitalist democracy. That doesn't fit my view of the 
people that the book describes. Instead, my description of the academic 
economists has generally been of individuals looking for ways to advance in 
their careers-choosing research strategies that offered them opportunities 
for advancement, and interesting problems to solve with the tools that they 
have. They went to RAND because it provided money and interesting 
colleagues; their association with RAND is not an indicator of a conspiracy 
or a war connection. While some of the researchers the author discusses may 
have favored democratic capitalism as an ideology, the ones I know were not 
especially ideologically committed, but instead were willing to follow the 
analysis wherever it might lead. Rational choice doesn't provide support of 
democratic capitalism, and I doubt whether most of the scholars he 
discussed would say it does. Scholars gravitated to RAND because that was 
where the money and interesting people were, not because scholars at RAND 
or the scholars had some grand design to construct a research program to 
defend democratic capitalism. 
  
My point is that there are advantages of both thick and thin histories, but 
I do not see thin histories as synonymous with "rational reconstruction" or 
with any specific approach. A thin history is simply a history written by 
an economist who wants to remain an economist, and, tempting as it might be 
to become something else, avoids the temptation and remains an economist.  
 
Dave Colander 
  
 
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