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In her review, Sent wrote about  a possible contrast "between rational and 
historical reconstruction." The former "starts from the idea that 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." The latter "is based on the premise that the extraction and 
comparison of peripheries without regard to their respective bodies of 
thought or historical context imminently violates the constitution of one 
theory in favor of another." 
 
The underlying assumption of this contrast is that economics can be neatly 
classified into schools or bodies. This kind of classification is probably 
inevitable in trying to deal with the complex phenomena of the history of 
economics. Not only is such a scheme more salable, the mind 
seems to demand some such simplified way of organizing the complex and 
voluminous materials. I would hope, however, that such neat classifications 
are regarded as an intermediate step in the historical study. I hope that 
if the study describes schools that it also deals with the economic idea or 
ideas that one believes connects or disconnects the schools. More 
fundamentally, I would hope that an historian of economics would focus his 
research fundamentally on ideas and not on schools, bodies or words. 
 
 
Pat Gunning 
Feng Chia University, Taiwan 
 
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