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I pick up the thin/thick history concept from Roy. Not being aware of the Geertz
background, I assumed at the time (I heard it during a presentation of a chapter of his
last book he did a year ago in France) that it has some kind of metaphorical meaning:
thick history would be a type of history that was thinned out of institutional/ideological
considerations. For example, I assume that what is called "Whig HET" in Smithian studies
is thin because the basic story that it taught would amount to something essentially
identical whether Adam Smith, the Physiocrats, or Ricardo would be under review (the
advent of the capitalist system/industrial revolution and the progressive
understanding of these phenomena by political economists). It is a one-way story (from
ignorance to full-knowledge) that was repeated time and again with slight variations.
Likewise, internal history is necessarily thin because the questions it asked is limited
to a set that is predefined by the present state of the art of economics.
 
Then, a thick HET would be a history that does not limit itself to ideas/representations
or relations between these ideas/representations that could be translated or understood
easily by a given set of scholars (economists, philosophers, historians,historians of
science). On the
other hand, thick HET does not in my mind exclude problems that are relevant to internal
HET, for example the analytical coherence of the Tableau Economique of Quesnay, but
inscribe it in a thicker/richer perspective. In the eyes of the thick historian (as I see
him) thin HET is a tool not an end.
 
Loic Charles 
 
 
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