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Failure to cite is just a special, immoral [If that word is still 
permissable] case of a more general phenomenon: that of citing an author 
while moving the substance of the author's material into an alternative 
and competing paradigm.  The latter is only intellectually "immoral".  
The glaring example of Sraffa and Hollander attempting to move Ricardo 
into NeoMarxian and Neoclassical paradigms is to hand.  Ricardo belongs in 
neither.  What the two Cambridges did to the economics of Keynes is 
another case in point. 
 
The question is interesting in its broader form because it is a critical 
question for the History of Economic Thought.  The History of Economic 
Thought ought to be the discipline that keeps paradigms in order, and 
remains faithful to authors' intentions.  In my reading, this ideal has 
not been honoured in much that passes for the History of Economic Thought. 
 In the ususal case, in practice, what we are presented with is a partisan 
attempt to subsume every piece of information than can be subsumed into a 
favoured paradigm, and to dismiss or ignore any information that cannot.  
This can be done in a number of ways.  Authors can be selectively cited.  
They can be reinterpreted (What they really meant, or what they would say 
in another context, etc.).  An idea that has relatively clear meaning and 
connotations in current literature can be searched back and found in 
earlier literature, as though the meaning and connotations were the same 
two hundred years ago.  Finding the notion of externalities in Marshall 
and Rae, as I recently did, is a case in point. 
 
Most recently I have been watching Albert Breton, in his truely masterful 
COMPETITIVE GOVERNMENTS, skate around Brennan and Buchanan's THE POWER TO 
TAX.  One great difference between Breton and Scott's THE ECONOMIC 
CONSTITUTION OF FEDERAL STATES (1978) and Breton's COMPETITIVE 
GOVERNMENTS (1996) is the notion that intergovernmental competition in 
taxation is an efficiency generating force, an idea that received clear 
and pointed statement in Brennan and Buchanan's THE POWER TO TAX (1980). 
In the credits given in the Preface to the 1996 volume, Breton does not 
mention Brennan and Buchanan, and at the half dozen or so points at which 
he cites their work it is given its due, but with an implication that, 
after all, it misses some points. 
 
Breton credits Public Choice Economics with advancing his subject matter, 
but he credits Jean-Luc Migue with bringing the advances to his notice.  
Here, I, a Canadian, see the citation process working to raise a profile 
rather than to supress it.  English-speaking Canadians generally treat 
francophone Canadians, Quebequois, as, well, "also rans", and francophones 
will go to any length to show that the most advanced ideas are to be found 
in the French Canadian literature.  Partizanship makes journalists of us, 
rather than historians. 
 
The question of efficient taxation goes back to Wicksell's 1896 paper, of 
course.  Breton continually makes much of what he calls the "Wicksellian 
connection".  Wicksell, however, was working towards an institutional 
arrangement that would facilitate efficient taxation.  He wanted to change 
things for the better. Breton is working towards a rationalization of the 
existing institutional arrangement in the United States and Canada.  He 
wants to show that things are about as good as they can be.  This 
contextual difference generates a very different kind of economics. 
 
Now let me draw back some.  I will not say that Breton is abusing 
Wicksell.  He is using a Wicksellian idea.  And, I must confess that 
Breton's work is, truely, masterful, and that I will have much to learn 
from rereading it, which I shall.  I suffer from the necessary weakness 
of all historians of thought.  I am always "digging in someone else's back 
yard" and so I am always something of an amature in the economicses with 
which I deal.  I do not thoroughly trust my own judgements.  Still, I 
think that the evolution of the information environment of economics is a 
proper and essential subject of the History of Economic Thought, and the 
historian must always keep in mind that, as the general practice of the 
History of Economic Thought goes, even when an author is citing a source, 
generally the citation is being "used", not faithfully represented. 
 
The case in which an author fails to cite at all is a special case of a 
general phenonemon in the History of Economic Thought.  It may be an 
attempt to take possesion of someone else's idea, to appropriate it.  It 
may be an attempt to supress the paradigm in which the idea first 
appeared.  From the point of view of the History of Economic Thought, 
which is the more "immoral"? 
 
Robin Neill 
 
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