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Roy Weintraub's response to Gunning and Lee does not face the consequences
of his own important work. If there is "no position apart from the doing
of economics which can inform the consideration of the doing of economics,"
then the same should hold true of 'the doing of studies of the past.' Or
anything else for that matter. All studies of anything are, in an
important way, "presentist" (the more important of Roy's criteria of
Whiggism), because they are informed by the present position of the author
of the study.
This understanding has often been used to unmask the ideological purposes
of studies purporting to be objective -- whether the studies are about the
way the economy works, or about the way thought about the way the economy
works has developed though time.
Having done the unmasking, one can (a) offer an alternative record of the
past that is frank about (or at least implicitly conscious of) the way
one's own ideological premises and purposes color the record; or one might
instead (b) offer an alternative record that tries to free itself of the
ideological muddle altogether, ridding itself of the present context and
setting itself instead in the "historical context".
Roy likes (b), and for good reason: first, one might learn something new in
the writing or reading of such a record; second (though I am not as sure
that he agrees with this), airing openly one's ideological commitments and
metaphysical preconceptions often makes for impolite conversation.
His next step, though, is ironic: in order to promote (b) he wants to call
it "history" and demarcate it from nonhistory, much as logical positivists
wanted to demarcate science from nonscience, notwithstanding his belonging
to an intellectual legacy that is skeptical of the latter attempt. So he
quotes with approval Latour's claim that a self-contained self-referential
history of science "does not count as history at all. At best it is court
historiography ..."
(One heard a lot of this at the April HOPE conference on "The Future of the
History of Economics". At least three times someone said in discussion,
"but that's not history ...," revealing a demarcation criterion that the
speaker thought he met but others did not. The disagreement about what we
mean by "history" is widespread.)
The trouble is that if you took Roy seriously from the beginning, you're
already persuaded of the omnipresentness of presentism. Which means that
every study of the past is to a degree "court historiography" -- the
court's presence living in the premises and preconceptions of the
historian. Which means that history, as Roy has demarcated it, is an empty
category.
So why even have it around? It would seem that the thing to do would be to
define history broadly enough so that it includes even what the quotation
of Latour excludes, and then to talk about "kinds of history that I don't
like" instead of nonhistory. And sometimes Roy does seem to do this -- and
at other times he does not. In any case I don't think he considers the
pernicious use that can be -- is not necessarily, but can be -- made of the
empty category.
Namely, after history is demarcated from nonhistory, terms like "historical
reconstruction" and "historical context" can be used as badges while
forgetting about the reason and criterion of demarcation, and so forgetting
that the category must really be empty. It is necessary to forget, because
to remember would be to realize that one's history can't meet the standard
of "history" as it has been demarcated; to remember would be to deny one's
own objectivity and admit the validity of some criticisms of prejudice.
And that, the author fears, would be rhetorically fatal.
The other day I was reading Barbara Fried's _The Progressive Assault on
Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement_
(Harvard, 1998). She writes, "This book is primarily a work of
intellectual history -- an attempt to excavate and restore in its
historical context an elaborate and (in its time) seditious argument about
the nature of law and legal rights" (p.28). To me the book represents an
impressive work of research into past thought -- as well as a transparent
work of advocacy for more state involvement in the constitution,
regulation, and taxation of markets than Hale's foes (or current political
consensus?) would accept. What kind of work does the term "historical
context" do for her?
Pat Gunning got it pretty right.
Steve Meardon
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