I of course apologize to Professors Waterman and Medema for
overlooking their HEI paper on Samuelson as an historian of economic
thought, and their book on the subject which is in preparation. I was
I think distracted by a serious underlying issue concerning writing
the history of recent (post-WWII) economics. Let me try to explain.

While ambassador to India, J. K. Galbraith, frequently bored, wrote
several works under pseudonyms unrelated to his work in political
economy. One of these, The McLandress Dimension (by “Mark Epernay”)
concerns Professor McLandress who constructs a scale to measure the
self-centeredness of political leaders. The “dimension” measures the
average number of seconds in the leader’s political utterance before a
first person pronoun appears. Profesor McLandress then gets confused
upon realizing that Charles De Gaulle appeared to have a dimension of
infinity.  The matter was resolved when the professor grasped that
when De Gaulle referred to “France”, he was referring to himself.

With the arrival of the Samuelson Papers at Duke, we have been visited
by a number of scholars who, after time in the archives, want to talk
about what they are finding.  I’ve been increasingly aware that the
more than a hundred autobiographical pieces Samuelson wrote are
continuous with the hundreds of historical pieces he wrote.  Given his
centrality to economics post-1939, for over 70 years he was the
embodiment of modern history of economics. Put another way, he was
himself the history; he had a McLandress dimension writing
autobiography of perhaps five, but in writing history of economics his
dimension was infinity, for precisely the De Gaulle reason.

It is this problem that needs to be faced when writing about Samuelson
as an historian of economics. I suspect we are decades away from being
able to understand this issue. It will be several decades before
Samuelson has his Moggridge or Skidelsky.

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