At one point to amuse myself I went around the Economic History 
Association meetings asking different economists what was the 
"bare minimum" you had to "believe" to be an economist (or to be  
able to use the results of mainstream economic research, not exactly 
the same thing).  I got a lot of different answers -- ranging from 
constrained maximization to "the demand curve slopes down". 
     I asked this for two reasons.  First, I was getting kind of 
tired of historians assuming that if I was going to use economic 
analysis of any type then I had to be assuming that people are 
all individualistic profit-seekers with no other type of motivation 
whatsoever.  Second, a historian friend had verbalized to me what 
I think is in the back of a lot of my history colleagues:  economics 
is not an academic discipline; it is a belief system. 
     My own micro training focused on constrained maximization (or 
minimization--the Dual) -- same with applied courses -- you started 
out on the blackboard with a utility function U=(a,b,c ...) and yoyu 
Max U(a,b,c ...) subject to (s.j.) a vector of constraints.  Theoretically 
, anything goes -- whatever you can imagine goes in those parentheses. 
     So quite sincerely I did not understand why so many people believed 
that economic research was limited to the market.  Until I went back 
and read Samelson's first text, and further back and read Marshall 
(again -- read it in history of econ thot as a grad student) and then 
read a wonderful book about MArshall and economic history by ... 
(oh rats forgot the name) and the HOPE issue on Marshall and discovered 
the term "catalitics" (mispelled I'm sure, sorry).   
     It really requires quite a different set of priors to go at 
economic analysis via Marshall/Samuelson (meaning Samuelson's    
heuristic paradigm, not his research) than the way I was taught. 
And further -- different specialties WITHIN economics require 
different sets of accepted priors -- money and banking does not 
study the same types of problems as urban or labor, for example. 
     Except for the debate among psychologists and some economists 
about what "rational behavior" means, is there a literature on this? 
It would be helpful in being able to explain economics AS A DISCPLINE 
to historians if I could show the variety WITHIN economics. 
     I also sense an unwillingness on the part of most economists to 
confront this themselves.  The persona of the economist seems most 
comfortable with a "This is the TRUTH" stance -- if that other guy 
over there disagrees with me, well then he's WRONG (and maybe  
a fool, and maybe even dangerous).  Having to talk about sincere 
diferences among economists according to when theywere trained and 
what type of research specialty they have seems to make them  
uncomfortable (a cause or effect of the decline of HET requirements?) 
     Reactions? 
     -- Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova