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While I greatly respect Kevin Hoover's and David Colander's remarks here, and have enjoyed
reading Kevin Quinn's postings as well, I am not comfortable with this emergent "Roy's
sense" of good history that they are constructing.
 
In my original posting I noted that we do not accept an extended literature survey as one
of the three essays in a Duke Ph.D. economics thesis. Of course some labor students for
example might have such a survey as an introductory chapter of their labor thesis. That is
fine and not too inappropriate for a labor economics thesis. It is rather that that is not
something that Goodwin, DeMarchi, or I would supervise and by our supervision accept as a
contribution to the history of economics. Note: this is not a statement that I find such
surveys to be bad because they are thin, or because thay internalist, or such. It is that
while those approaches to writing history may be useful in some contexts, for us they do
not represent research in the history of economics -- they are reinterpretations usually
of secondary materials, and in the context of a serious doctoral dissertation in the
history of economics, they are not research intensive.  If a student wants one of us to
serve on their committee, and supervise a chapter essay, they need to do something that we
value as research in HOPE: in recent years we have had Paul Harrison, Steve Meardon,
Spencer Banzhaf, Ted Gayer, and others take that route, and have several more in process
in the Duke Ph.D. program.
 
On the issue of thin versus thick histories, my argument has always been that I favor the
former, because I believe that they are underrepresented in the mix of contributions in
the history of economics. I have also argued that it is
very difficult for graduate students of economics to write such histories, since that is
not what they are trained as economists to do. That is instead what historians train their
students to do. It is though what we try to help our Duke students to do, even against the
grain of their regular graduate training. Our is not a majority position in HES however.
Thus I think we will certainly continue to have a subdiscipline in which most of the
contributions
will likely be thin, as a simple consequence of the fact that most all historians of
economics are trained as economists.
 
Similarly for "internalist" history, were you to replace "thin history" with "internalist
history" in the paragraph above (since they are not the same thing).
 
My larger "meta-point" has always been that we should have a greater variety of approaches
to writing histories of economics, and that the economist's training makes that a real
challenge. Not having been trained as an economist, that's easier for me to say.
 
 
E. Roy Weintraub 
Duke University 
 
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