The 14th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of
Economic Thought

The 14th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of
Economic Thought (ESHET) will be held at the Amsterdam School of
Economics, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The conference will take place 25-28 March 2010.

As at past ESHET conferences, proposals for papers or sessions on all
aspects of the history of economic thought are welcome.

The special theme of the conference is:

The Practices of Economists in the Past and Today

Economists are practitioners, but the nature and history of their
practices is not well understood. Practices include writing tracts to
convince the Crown of the benefits of trade, carrying out surveys to tax
and manage new colonies, taking part in debating societies to criticize
government politics, travelling through the country to report on
conditions, designing statistical classification schemes to frame the
economy, and modelling economic problems from the armchair. Practices
depend on institutional settings and technologies, which are themselves
shaped by their outcomes.

Were the theories and practices of the Physiocrats dependent on Quesnay’s
role as physician to Madame de Pompadour? Was Keynes’s practice as an
economist not just the result of his involvement in the worlds of
administration and art but also of the emergence of the telephone as a new
technology of communication? To what extent did the interdisciplinary
setting of the RAND corporation influence the change in economics after
the war? Is the idea of an economic experiment in Glasgow University in
the 18th century comparable to the experimental way of life in postwar
mass education?

Possible topics with examples of influences on practices include:

· the role of visualisation (the Phillips machine, simulations, graphs,
barometers)

· the role of new technologies and instruments (computers, fMRI-scans,
paper money, joint ventures, z-tree)

· the role of disciplines (economics and psychology, economics and
sociology, economics and medicine)

· the role of sites (statistical institutes, the Political Economy Club,
the economic laboratory, the Central Bank, Chestnut Street, Lancashire,
rural Russia, Oxbridge, RAND)

· the role of audience (adviser to the King, journalist, academic)



Professor Charles Plott, Edward S. Harkness Professor of Economics and
Political Science at the California Institute of Technology, and Karin
Knorr Cetina, Visiting Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at
University of Chicago have kindly agreed to give keynote lectures.

For proposals for papers and sessions on all topics in the history of
economics an abstract of up to 400 words for a paper and up to 600 words
for a session should be submitted by November 15, 2009. To submit an
abstract, register at the conference website
(http://www.eshet.net/conference/2010) and follow the instructions. A
selection of papers from the conference will appear in a future issue of
the European Journal for the History of Economic Thought.

ESHET Young Scholars Seminar

ESHET invites young scholars (i.e. those who are working on or have just
completed a PhD, regardless of their age) to submit their work to the
Young Scholars Seminar to be held on the occasion of the ESHET Conference.
Four submissions will be selected: ESHET will cover board, accommodation
and registration fees plus travel expenses up to €300. The authors of the
selected papers will have 30 minutes each to present the paper and a
senior scholar, appointed by the ESHET Council, will discuss it. Papers
may be on any topic relevant to the history of economics, and are not
restricted to the conference theme. ESHET encourages young scholars to
participate in the conference. A one-year ESHET membership is offered to
all young scholars who submit a paper. Candidates should e-mail a paper no
longer than 9000 words to Professors Ragip Ege and Tiziano Raffaelli
([log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]), by 10 January
2010. The results of the selection process will be communicated to the
candidates by 15 February 2010. Papers that have not been selected will be
considered for presentation at other conference sessions.

Scientific committee:

Annie Cot (University of Paris 1), John Davis (University of Amsterdam),
Harro Maas (University of Amsterdam), Tiziano Raffaeli (University of
Pisa)

Local organizing committee: John Davis (University of Amsterdam), Harro
Maas (University of Amsterdam), Tiago Mata (University of Amsterdam)


Amos Witztum