As someone who is not a historian of thought but who does economic 
methodology "part-time," I've been reading with interest the "contemporary 
history" discussion.  Interesting discussions by non-historians that seem 
to me relevant to contemporary history of thought sometime appear. A prime
example is a paper by the well-known development economist Dilip Mookherjee entitled "Is There Too Little Theory in Development Economics Today?" 
(Economics and Political Weekly, 40, 2005) Originally presented at a conference
(at Cornell) on "75 Years of Development Research," it was of enough interest
that EPW published it plus invited comments by several other leading 
development economists. It presents an interpretation of the "stages" of
development economics over its recent history. The title suggests (correctly)
that the paper tangentially addresses the issue Roy Weintraub raised about 
the apparent sea change in the focus in much of economics. There is some
discussion of the Mookherjee paper in a paper by Jon Ratner and me, "Exploring
Different Visions of the Model-Empirics Nexis: Solow versus Lipsey," scheduled
to appear in the Journal of Economic Methodology. That paper uses the Mookerjee
analysis as one of three case studies of the relation in recent economics
between empirical work and modeling.

Robert Goldfarb