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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:28 2006 |
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----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
In her review, Sent wrote about a possible contrast "between rational and
historical reconstruction." The former "starts from the idea that the
theory from one school could be extracted, without much violence, from the
author's body of thought, its underpinning vision, and its environmental
context." The latter "is based on the premise that the extraction and
comparison of peripheries without regard to their respective bodies of
thought or historical context imminently violates the constitution of one
theory in favor of another."
The underlying assumption of this contrast is that economics can be neatly
classified into schools or bodies. This kind of classification is probably
inevitable in trying to deal with the complex phenomena of the history of
economics. Not only is such a scheme more salable, the mind
seems to demand some such simplified way of organizing the complex and
voluminous materials. I would hope, however, that such neat classifications
are regarded as an intermediate step in the historical study. I hope that
if the study describes schools that it also deals with the economic idea or
ideas that one believes connects or disconnects the schools. More
fundamentally, I would hope that an historian of economics would focus his
research fundamentally on ideas and not on schools, bodies or words.
Pat Gunning
Feng Chia University, Taiwan
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