------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (January 2006)  
  
Warren J. Samuels, Willie Henderson, Kirk D. Johnson and Marianne   
Johnson, editors, _Essays on the History of Economics_. New York:   
Routledge, 2004. xiii + 340 pp. $165 (cloth), ISBN: 0-415-70006-X.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by Maria Pia Paganelli, Department of Economics,   
Yeshiva University.  
  
  
The unifying theme of _Essays on the History of Economics_ may not be   
obvious from simply looking at its table of contents. The volume has   
four essays. Willie Henderson and Warren Samuels write on "The   
Etiology of Adam Smith's Division of Labor: Alternative Accounts and   
Smith's Methodology Applied to Them" with an appendix by Henderson on   
"How Does Smith Achieve a Synthesis in Writing? Evidence from His   
Propensity to Truck, Barter and Exchange." Warren Samuels, Kirk D.   
Johnson and Marianne Johnson write the second essay, titled "Should   
History-of-Economic-Thought Textbooks Cover 'Recent' Economic   
Thought?" as well as the third essay, "What the Authors of   
History-of-Economic-Thought Textbooks Say about the History of   
Economics." The last essay is a solo by Samuels on "Thorstein Veblen   
as Economic Theorist."  
  
What connects these four essays is summarized by Samuels in the   
introduction: "If John R. Hicks is correct that no one theory can   
answer all our questions, then perhaps there is room for multiple   
theories of capital, of cost, and so on, each devoted to inquiring   
into different questions. As it stands, most economists seem   
compelled to believe that only one correct theory of capital or of   
cost, etc. can exist and then adopt their favorite one -- all the   
while using it as a tool or element of design strategy. Historians of   
economic thought can enrich economic theory by educating future   
economists along the lines of theoretical pluralism" (p. 6).  
  
If a goal of history of economic thought is to show that economics   
and its history is not a monolith, but rather a discipline with a   
plurality of socially constructed theories and concepts, this is a   
successful work of history of economic thought.  
  
The first essay deals with the plurality of interpretations of Adam   
Smith's sources of the division of labor. Through a meticulous   
textual analysis, the authors show that in addition to the   
oft-mentioned propensity to truck, barter and exchange and reason and   
speech, four additional sources for the division of labor can be   
argued for. Division of labor may emerge because individuals take   
advantage of opportunities, because of the presence of a commercial   
society, because of the "nature of human nature" or because of human   
desire for approbation. The interpretative conflicts and paradoxes   
associated with the language are numerous.  
  
The second essay is explicitly meant to challenge Joseph Dorfman's   
answer to the question: Where does history of economic thought end?   
In _The Economic Mind in American Civilization_ (1959) Dorfman claims   
that time must pass for us to gain knowledge and perspective. The   
authors show that history of economic thought is able to handle   
recency in a more variegated way than Dorfman is willing to admit.   
The authors go though 73 textbooks in their various editions (a total   
of 124 textbooks) to see how recency is handled. They report for each   
whether the problem of recency is explicitly discussed, how the   
design changed over the years to account for recent materials, the   
extent of coverage of recent materials, and the frequency of   
citations and references to prominent post-war economists. The   
results are mixed: there is no clear end of history of economic   
thought, which contradicts Dorfman's rule, and supports the idea of   
pluralism in the history of economic thought. Dealing with recency   
may reduce the risks of a history written by the survivors or by the   
winners. Also, the multitude of histories of economic thought seems   
to dispute Dorfman's assertion that the one correct story will be   
revealed with the full knowledge generated by the passage of time.   
Another conclusion from this chapter seems a challenge to trained   
historians of economic thought: "most of recent   
history-of-economic-thought work is undertaken by economists (and   
others) who are not historians of economic thought" (p. 179) through   
survey articles, literature reviews, specialized encyclopedias,   
biographies and the like. Pluralism in the discipline comes also from   
the diversity of writers of the history of the discipline.  
  
The third essay reports the historiographic position of 63 textbooks.   
It successfully shows that "the history of economic thought does not   
write itself" (p. 264) but is filtered through the interpretive eyes   
of the textbook writer. By analyzing the design strategies of the   
textbooks, this chapter is a testimony to the pluralism of the   
discipline. The diversity of interpretations is visible in the choice   
of starting and ending time, in the individuals and schools covered,   
and especially in the focus on theories or on ideas. The work   
presented seems immense, as for each historiographic question there   
is a list of authors who provide an answer and the answer itself.   
Given the amount of information presented, it seems like an   
electronic version of this chapter, with the option of electronically   
searching it, would be useful as a working tool for a scholar   
interested in this kind of research.  
  
The last essay challenges the hegemony of neoclassical economics in   
defining theory. The interpretation of the work of Thorstein Veblen   
is used to demonstrate the limits of such supremacy. The same author   
(Veblen) can be interpreted as an anti-theorist as well as a   
theorist, depending on how theory is defined. If by theory we   
understand only neoclassical theory, a la Blaug, then Veblen is an   
anti-theorist and offers no theory. By expanding the definition of   
theory to include non-neoclassical theories, Veblen is a theorist (a   
non-neoclassical one) and is not anti-theory (while he is   
anti-neoclassical).  
  
The volume is an immense work of scholarship, as shown by the rich   
twenty-five pages of bibliography. It is a dense picture of the state   
of the discipline today, a picture that shows a dynamic cacophony of   
different voices, rather than a unified but maybe more monotonous   
tune.  
  
  
Maria Pia Paganelli is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yeshiva   
University. She works on eighteenth-century money theories and on   
Adam Smith.  
  
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