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[Editor's Note: The following response to Roy Weintraub's editorial was 
sent to me privately on October 8 by S. Ambirajan (using the email account 
of a friend). Because the response seemed appropriate to the list, I asked 
Professor Ambirajan for permission to post the response on HES. With the 
sender's blessing, here it is. RBE] 
 
          I am in the United States on a brief visit and have only just now 
discovered the wonders of Internet although I have been a subscriber to the 
HOPE since its  first number, and have been a member of the HES since its 
inception. That makes me a card carrying member of the History of Economic 
Thought fraternity. 
          Professor Weintraub makes  many illuminating points and certainly 
no one would quibble with his advice that historians of economics should 
maintain high standards of scholarship. But why make it special? That advice 
should apply to all areas of scholarship. In my humble opinion, our 
sub-discipline has indeed produced some outstanding works of scholarship 
along with not so good, just as other sub-disciplines have their share of 
good, bad and indifferent. 
         Whom should the historians of economic thought emulate?  The 
natural  scientist, diplomatic historian, or a constitutional lawyer.....? 
It would appear that the method and nature of discourse will depend upon the 
specific subject chosen by the individual historian for investigation. We 
need to remember that history is not merely an account of how  "one damn 
thing followed by another". The past throws many queries some of which 
stimulates the scholarly curiosity while others  go to help understand some 
of the pressing concerns of the present.  The historian of economic thought 
who sets about to reconcile   Wealth of Nations  with  Theory of Moral 
Sentiments   or  to find out what Rosa Luxemborg  did to Marx's economics 
or to extract  fragments of game theory  in Talmudic texts  will be using 
very different materials and methodology   compared to another historian of 
economic thought probing into the political use of economic ideas by  vested 
interests to support free trade, protection , bimetallism etc. in late 19th 
century  or  examining the manner in which economic ideas entered government 
policies during inter-war Britain.  If the individual scholar is 
sufficiently serious about his work, he will no doubt acquire the necessary 
tools that may  be  needed  to pursue the subject of research. 
           In the ultimate analysis, does it seriously matter where the 
individual scholar is located as long as he is able to write books and 
papers that every other historian of economic thought wishes he wrote  them 
or others find it interesting. Off hand  the following works come to my 
mind:  R.D.C.Black's Economic Thought and the Irish Question, Frank Fetter's 
British Monetary Orthodoxy,,  Mark Blaug's Ricardian Economics,  George 
Stigler's paper on the  development of Utility theory or Nathan Rosenberg's 
institutional aspects of  Wealth of Nations.  While it does not matter where 
the individual historian of economic thought is  employed so long as he is 
able to pursue his intellectual labours,  there can be no doubt that  the 
practising economist (teacher, researcher or adviser) needs to know the 
history of his discipline  far more than the  natural scientist needs the 
history of natural sciences.  Of course for the pure economic theorist 
interested in nothing but  catching the  phantoms that dart in his 
blackboard, neither  history of economic thought, nor economic history, nor 
political science, nor  philosophy, nor indeed anything that has to do with 
man and his   life (temporal or intellectual) is needed.   But even in the 
MIT economics department,  such  theorists may not  be in the majority. It 
may be a well worn cliche, but worth repeating. Old economics never dies and 
gets buried for ever. because as Keynes reminded us sixty years ago that it 
is exhumed from time to time in ways we cannot anticipate. From the point of 
social good, the historian of economic thought is better located in 
economics departments  than elsewhere. 
 
S.Ambirajan 
 
 
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