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In reply to Professor Weintraub 
 
Because I do most of my research and teaching on 20th century material, I 
have generally not been asked to teach history of economic thought courses. 
 It seems that most people exclude the 20th century as a part of the 
history of economics and the history of economic thought.  To get around 
this, I teach my courses historically.  For example, when I teach graduate 
neoclassical microeconomics, I have the students start with Marshall's 
Principles and then show the students how demand theory or production/cost 
theory, etc. developed in the 20th century. In another course that I get to 
teach once every blue moon on Post Keynesian price and production models, I 
start with the surplus models of Ricardo and then proceed with the Austrian 
models and end up with Leontief and Sraffa--that is the students get a 
historical understanding of how these types of models developed. Teaching 
courses historically is a way to get around the reluctance of colleagues to 
accept a history of economics in the 20th century course. But this also 
means that 20th century canonical texts depends on the history I am 
teaching: it could be Marshall, Robinson, Chamberlin, Pigou, and Bain in 
one case; and Leontief, Sraffa, Burchardt, Nurske, Steedman, Gaitskell, and 
Kurz and Salvadori in another case. 
 
The question I have is why are our colleagues so reluctant to accept the 
teaching of such a course.  My gut feeling is that it has to do with the 
dominance of, broadly speaking, neoclassical economics and the religious 
adherence to it by most economists.  Teaching history means that you give 
students access to a long memory and one that contains features/aspects 
that suggest that neoclassical economics has been challenged and that there 
are very different ways of thinking about economic theory.  Of course one 
could teach a sort of whiggish history of economic thought for the 20th 
century--and this would not be very different in style from the sort of 
whiggish pre-20th century history of thought generally taught (who would 
ever think of teaching Georgism or the German/English historical school or 
anarchism-Christain socialism in a history of economic thought course).  
But such a whiggish course which delineates the natural unfolding and 
flowering of neoclassical economics would simply reflect to dominance of 
neoclassical economics and beliefs of its adherents and not be a real 
history course. 
 
Fred Lee 
 
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