Perhaps one significant reason why few historians 
of economics have studied its contemporary forms 
is the difficulty of the task. If one wants to 
call oneself a historian of economics, one can do 
so more easily by studying pre-WWII economics. As 
history is about the past, the study of long-dead 
economists can more readily be identified with 
history than that of living economists. But 
historians would not be duped. History is not 
just about the past: it is about its 
construction. And this explains much of the 
inattention to contemporary economics. Whereas 
historians of long-dead economists can take 
advantage of the confusion between the 
chronological past and the constructed past, 
historians of recent economics cannot: they need 
to build this past that some still consider their 
present.  If one studies contemporary economics 
and claims it to be history, one needs to show 
that one is constructing a past in a way that 
marks it out as history not as a contribution to 
contemporary economics - that it is not, for 
example, a survey article.

Perhaps Roy Weintraub's question can be 
reformulated in a slightly different way: Is it 
so surprising that people who call themselves 
historians of economics but were not trained as 
historians show little interest in recent 
economics when historians themselves can have 
trouble placing the writing historically about 
the present time?  A few years ago, the Ecole 
normale sup?rieure de Cachan hosted an Institut 
d'histoire du temps pr?sent. There most 
historians were studying WWII. Even they were not 
studying more recent history than that.


Philippe Fontaine