John Womack is closest to revealing the real problem: our graduates do not receive accurate accounts of the HET, even of its major historical figures, because much of the past is presented through the lens of passing current controversies as addressed and as understood by modern authors.
  
This is not a new phenomenon.  The ideological conflict between rising Soviet power and Western capitalist economies from the 1930s, led to the decades of the Cold War. One such apparently minor struggle in that major global competition had significant side-affects on HET, which are still with us.

Paul Samuelson wrote his canonical “Economics: an introductory Analysis” (1945-48) before achieving tenure, but felt ‘safe’ to undertake the project because of the numerous outstanding journal articles he had already published and because the invitation came from of his head of department, not the publisher, to undertake the assignment.  But his knowledge of the history of economic thought in at least one area was limited to a secondary (and misleading - from the ‘Chinese Whispers’ affect) HET oral tradition, not to his own familiarity with an original text. (I had an article on Paul Samuelson's role in these events published in The Journal of the History of Economic Ideas, 2010.)

Samuelson initiated a fatal misleading allusion that unintentionally has misled and dominated almost the entire profession since, because his famous textbook (20 editions to 2010, 5 million plus sales, numerous foreign language editions, plus the secondary market) had such a mass side-effect.  Readers and tutors believed what they read about this aspect of HET, propelled by Samuelson's deserved reputation in modern economics. 

I refer to Samuelson’s description of Adam Smith and the “invisible hand” in Wealth Of Nations, both by a paraphrase on page 36 (1st edition), and from his various changing paraphrases of what it, supposedly, meant in the body of the textbook thereafter.  These remarks were taken to extremes in association with the Welfare theorems and General Equilibrium, which ignore Smith's clearly stated moral stances in TMS. Samuelson's (and presumably his tutors’) erroneous interpretation of Smith’s use of the IH metaphor in TMS and WN his have dominated the beliefs of generations of graduates.  Those beliefs are now ubiquitous, even among the majority of historians of economic thought of the highest caliber, and presumably will continue to infest the thinking of new generations of our students, current and future legislators, and those who influence them, the media and the public, and HET generally.

That is why I await publication of Warren Samuel’s forthcoming new book with great interest - and anticipation.

Gavin Kennedy