Every so often, the list kicks alive with a historiographic debate that
touches a nerve in our disciplinary self-understanding.

Roy Weintraub's post inquires into the history of a certain kind of
economics. Prima facie, this is a synchronous concern. Some of the
discussion moved in response to locate kinds of economics along several axes
(e.g. 'empirical', 'theoretical', 'mainline'). His post also raises a
diachronic concern: are we sufficiently aware of the present (in the sense
of Boulding's 'extended present')? From which, as commentators have noted,
follow others: what should we make of the intersection between contemporary
economics and historical scholarship? Do we need historiographic 'embargo'
periods? Is JHET a 'JEL of the past', perhaps with a bit more emphasis on
'About the author'?

It seems we are, yet again, and as Tiago Mata and Roy himself have pointed
out, at a juncture where disciplinary historians in other fields have begun
defining the relevant historiographic questions (be)for us.

Or maybe not? There is an empirical dimension to Roy's question that I find
compels us to look for evidence beyond what we pick up intuitively as
members of economics departments. When it comes to issues of synchronous
bias of contemporary histories, perhaps one should look in another place
altogether, over at RePEc and similar projects and the data they generate.
We have here, pace de Solla Price, and in direct competition to Garfield's
ISI, a nucleus for metrics and content analyses that historians ignore at
their peril in this post-generalist age.

Matthias Klaes