I agree with most of what has been written in support of the campaign to 
persuade the Australian authorities to continue to treat economic history 
and the history of economic thought as part of 'economics'. When I worked 
for my doctorate at the Australian National University in the 1960s 
Economics and Economic History, though separate departments, were 
immediately adjacent in the Coombes Building and for most intellectual 
purposes acted as one. My thesis (on the post-war Australian business cycle: 
'history'? applied macro-theory? both?) was jointly supervised by the 
respective heads of these departments, Trevor Swan and Noel Butlin. Though 
HET was not recognized as a separate discipline at the ANU, there were 
many -- including G. S. L. Tucker, lately returned from England -- who were 
learned in various aspects of HET and who deployed this learning in their 
own research. All will remember that in his celebrated 1956 growth model 
(contemporaneous with Solow's very similar model) Swan explicitly modified 
his 'neo-classical' model by making population growth endogenous, a la 
Malthus, in order to obtain 'classical' results.

However, I have been uneasy with the sometimes strident tone of some of the 
contributions so far, and dissatisfied with the attempts to show why 
'history of economic though' can be and sometimes is a part of 'economics'. 
Since each of these themes appear in Sam Bostaph's recent posting, I hope he 
will not mind if I take off from there.

1.  Is HET a part of 'Economics'?
Yes and no.
    If by HET we mean the intellectual history (IH) of political economy, 
which is what most who have written so far seem to have assumed, then the 
answer is 'No'. IH is 'contextual', as many have pointed out, and its 
practitioners need the skills of historians and philosophers (sometimes even 
of theologians!) at least as much of those of economists. The recent volume 
of 'New Voices on Adam Smith' (eds. Montes and Schliesser) contains only 
four essays by economists: the rest are by philosophers and political 
scientists. Thouigh the techniques of economic analysis may be valuable (I 
have argued essential) for doing the IH job properly, the contribution is 
one-way: from economics to history and not the other way. This kind of 
study, interesting as it is to most members of the HES including me, can be 
of little or no value to working economists whose business is to apply the 
current techniques of their discipline to present-day, real-world problems. 
The Australian bureacrats are right to dismiss it.
    But if we agree that HET may legitimately include the history of 
economic analysis (HEA), what Mark Blaug called 'Economic Theory in 
Retrospect, then the story is quite different and the answer is 'Yes'. HEA 
becomes an in-house activity of economists themselves, what Paul Feyerabend 
(Against Method, 1988, p. 21) described as the process by which 'the history 
of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself . . . 
essential for its further development as well as giving content to the 
theories it contains at any particular moment'. It goes without saying that 
this kind of study can only be fruitfully undertaken by highly-trained 
economic theorists, well aware of the conceptual problems currently 
afflicting their discipline: authors such as Cannan, Schumpeter, Stigler, 
Blaug - - - and Samuelson! This brings me to my other point.

2.  Is Paul Samuelson an historian of economic thought?
If we are talking about IH, 'No'. If we are talking about HEA, 'Yes'.
    That Samuelson's is the most powerful mind to concern itself with 
economics in the 20th C will be agreed by most. That Samuelson has been 
deeply learned in the past history of our discipline for most of his life 
will be understood by any who have taken a look at Foundations (1947): which 
contains references to his predecessors from Barone, Bastiat, Bentham, 
Bohm-Bawerk, Bortkiewicz, Cannan, Cassels . . . to Senior, Sidgwick, 
Slutsky, Smith, Thunen, Veblen, Walras, Wicksell and Allyn Young. It is 
quite characteristic of his intellectual style that in that book he should 
have sought an illustration of the merely mathematical concept of one-sided 
stability-instabilty from Malthus's famous 'ratios: thereby inadvertently 
pioneering the 'production function' approach to the rational reconstruction 
of 'classical' economic analysis later exploited by Stigler, Baumol, 
Passinetti and many others. Samuelson's Presidential Address to the AEA in 
1961 was on 'Economists and the History of Ideas'. It is reprinted as the 
first of eight 'Essays in the History of Economics' in Volume 2 of his 
Collected Scientific Papers. The four essays on Ricardo and Marx reprinted 
in Volume 1 date from 1959-60. Since that date, Samuelson has continued a 
steady stream of articles in HEA, many -- including the 1978 piece on the 
'Canonical Classical Model' that Sam so unwisely allowed himself to sneer 
at --  of great explanatory power. Any who suspect that at the age of 92 
Samuelson thinks he is yet in his 'dotage' ought to take a look at his 
vigorous exchange with Garegnani in the latest number of European Journal of 
the History of Economic Thought. (Vol 14, No 2, June 2007).  Though I 
haven't weighted and measured, I am inclined to believe that Paul 
Samuelson's contributions to the history of economic thought (HEA division!) 
over the last sixty years are greater than those of any other living 
scholar. (And of course it is only a tiny part of his total output.)
    There is a moral to all this that I can't forebear from pointing out. If 
'history of economic thought' really does belong in 'economics', it is 
Samuelson's HEA, rather than the 'contextual'  IH of Montes and Schliesser 
and their colleagues which we all love so much.

Anthony Waterman