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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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