When I was writing my doctoral thesis in the history and methodology of mathematics, in the 1980s, I found Umberto Eco's How to Make a Thesis very useful and fun to read. The original Italian version Como si fa una tesi di laurea was published in 1977. I used the Dutch translation published in 1985.
 
Marcel Boumans

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Van: Societies for the History of Economics namens E. Roy Weintraub
Verzonden: do 2-12-2010 23:23
Aan: [log in to unmask]
Onderwerp: [SHOE] Writing in the History of Economics



Suppose one is mentoring a graduate or postdoctoral student in the history of economics. Suppose one is interested in having that student, socialized as an economist, learn to write "good" history of economics.  Usually, I suspect, the mentor would give the student some exemplary articles, and say "these are good articles; try to do something like this".  The mentor might also say, after extensive one on one conversations about a topic, "Ok, why don't you write about such and such. When you have a draft, we'll talk about it and how to improve it."  

 

What we seem to have is a question of learning craft practice. Just as we don't ask an industrial organization student to write a dissertation without having learned the field with courses, exams, and larger and larger writing exercises and talks leading to a "journal article", so too in the history of economics we ask students to read a relevant literature in order to generate some researchable questions.  But while in Industrial Organization it is the model and the results which perform the economics, and the article is simply a codified record of that performance, in the history of economics the written document itself performs the history. 

 

There appears to be nothing whatsoever in our collective writings about how to craft such a performance. We have, to be sure, discussions about historiography, about the right or best ways to think about writing the history of economics. I myself have written such pieces. But there appears not to be any published discussion about the craft of writing the history of economics that one could give to an apprentice student.  For economists in general, McCloskey's Economic Inquiry paper of 1985 on "Economical Writing", and her slender 1987 Macmillan paperback The Writing of Economics appear to be the total bookshelf. At Duke we have an online handbook for undergraduates (written by Paul Dudenhefer, the HOPE Managing Editor) on writing an economics paper, a guide that is directed entirely to the usual AER/JPE journal model. I am pretty sure that a number of other schools have similar guides for undergraduates. I am not however aware of anything directed to either the history of economics and more advanced students, apprentice scholars if you will. 




This leads me to the question I wish to pose to this list. Are there any similar resources for students in the history of economics (I know that there are for history graduate students)? For history of economics graduate or postdoctoral students? Put another way, are there any ways of leading students into our craft practices that are other than personal and idiosyncratic?


-- 
E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of Economics 
Fellow, Center for the History of Political Economy
Duke University
www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html