The International Economic Association sponsored a conference in Siena in 
2006 on "Keynes's General Theory After 70 Years," which I co-organized
with Robert Mundell and with IEA vice-president Alessandro Vercelli. The 
decision to accept it as an International Economic Association conference was
taken by the IEA Executive Committee at the 2005 IEA World Congress in 
Marrakesh. I understand that the planners of the 2011 IEA World Congress in
Beijing intend to have sessions on the history of economics.

Roy Weintraub has raised the issue of the extent to which mainstream 
economists are hostile to the history of economic thought because they 
identify the history of
economic thought with heterodox, dissenting approaches. But that cannot be 
the whole explanation of, for example, the recent action of the Australian 
Bureau of
Statistics, which is directed as much against economic history as against 
the history of economic thought:cliometricians, although much more aware of 
historical
context than is common for economists in other fields, are not usually 
suspected of heterodox leanings.

Robert Dimand