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Explaining Ourselves
Bruce Caldwell
Department of Economics
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
I think that historians of thought have recently been falling
down on the job. Let me explain myself.
Some of the latest moves within the history of thought -
methodology - science studies communities appear to be brimming
with self-referentiality. The idea that the sociology of
scientific knowledge (SSK), which itself has made recourse to
the models of economists, can be used to explain the activities
of economists, is the principal example that I have in mind.
It may be, though, that this self-referentiality is more
apparent than real. Though most of us in the communities
mentioned above are trained as economists, very few of us
actually DO economics (just ask your colleagues). If we really
want to explore the issues (and experience the discomfort) of a
truly self-referential examination, we should turn the tools
and lenses of SSK (or rhetorical analysis, or whatever) on
ourselves, on, that is, our activities as historians of
thought.
(An aside: I suspect some variant of neoclassically-oriented
SSK can explain why we haven't done this yet; since it involves
the tiny community of historians writing about historians for
historians, there is no audience for it, so as far as
professional self-interest goes, it's not rational to do it.
But perhaps a Post-Keynesian or Hayekian SSK which disavows
rational economic man could "rationalize" delving into the
question I want to ask.)
Anyway, if we did this, what would there be to explain? One
obvious candidate is our importation from other disciplines of
ways of representing intellectual history. We read Kuhn and
went in search of paradigms (or, if we were heterodox, of
anamolies and signs of paradigm shifts). We read Lakatos and
identified research programmes. We read Popper and looked for
crucial experiments. (No wonder we stopped reading him!) We
read Booth or Bloor or Hacking or... well, you get the point.
I have ideas about why we do this, and about how an explanation
of such behavior might turn out. But what I'd like to propose
is another, I think more interesting, aspect of our behavior for
exploration. The "stylized fact" (about how we have gone about
doing the history of thought) that I'd like to have explained
is the following:
Every decade or so, historians of thought hit upon an
individual whose work gets a huge, indeed an inordinate,
amount of attention. Why?
This "fact" (conjecture, really: I have not "tested" it with a
citation search) is based on the following impressionistic
reading of our history. Around the turn of the century Smith
scholarship appeared to take off. In the 1930s it was Marx.
In the 50s and 60s it was Ricardo (this might have happened
earlier had Sraffa not been - was it Keynes who said it - "the
most leisured man" he'd ever met). In the 70s and into the 80s,
it was Keynes of course. In the 90s, Hayek, or Morgenstern (or
even von Neumann or Wald - to point out some interesting leaps
"outside" of our discipline) might end up being candidates.
Now certainly one can dispute the conjecture. But if it has
at least some truth in it, why does it happen? Supply side
explanantions (e.g., the opening of archives, discoveries of
lost texts, the publication of a collected writings) surely
play a role, one would think. But is there something deeper
here? In particular, why is it that the work of certain
economists seem to resonate during certain periods of time?
Just to cite the example I'm most familiar with, Hayek appeals
to a broad array of economists because 1) they endorse or
detest his views on the economy, 2) his writings can be
interpreted as having some connection with contemporary
interests (e.g., such diverse groups as realists, those in
search of "post-modern moments", and those interested in
complexity theory all have cause to mention him), and 3) he
lived a long time and was in contact with (usually in
disagreement with) a huge assortment of influential economists.
Well, my goal in raising these issues is simply to stimulate
some discussion. Let me end this fanciful mid-Winter thought
experiment more formally by posing a few questions:
1. Is the conjecture (that as a profession there is a tendency
for us to move from "great economist" to "great economist")
true? If so, what accounts for it?
2. Are there other patterns? More generally, are there other
"stylized facts" about our behavior as historians that might
need explanation?
3. Finally, how do interpretive communities like ours decide
what, or whom, we will interpret?
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