I agree with most of what has been written in support of the campaign to
persuade the Australian authorities to continue to treat economic history
and the history of economic thought as part of 'economics'. When I worked
for my doctorate at the Australian National University in the 1960s
Economics and Economic History, though separate departments, were
immediately adjacent in the Coombes Building and for most intellectual
purposes acted as one. My thesis (on the post-war Australian business cycle:
'history'? applied macro-theory? both?) was jointly supervised by the
respective heads of these departments, Trevor Swan and Noel Butlin. Though
HET was not recognized as a separate discipline at the ANU, there were
many -- including G. S. L. Tucker, lately returned from England -- who were
learned in various aspects of HET and who deployed this learning in their
own research. All will remember that in his celebrated 1956 growth model
(contemporaneous with Solow's very similar model) Swan explicitly modified
his 'neo-classical' model by making population growth endogenous, a la
Malthus, in order to obtain 'classical' results.
However, I have been uneasy with the sometimes strident tone of some of the
contributions so far, and dissatisfied with the attempts to show why
'history of economic though' can be and sometimes is a part of 'economics'.
Since each of these themes appear in Sam Bostaph's recent posting, I hope he
will not mind if I take off from there.
1. Is HET a part of 'Economics'?
Yes and no.
If by HET we mean the intellectual history (IH) of political economy,
which is what most who have written so far seem to have assumed, then the
answer is 'No'. IH is 'contextual', as many have pointed out, and its
practitioners need the skills of historians and philosophers (sometimes even
of theologians!) at least as much of those of economists. The recent volume
of 'New Voices on Adam Smith' (eds. Montes and Schliesser) contains only
four essays by economists: the rest are by philosophers and political
scientists. Thouigh the techniques of economic analysis may be valuable (I
have argued essential) for doing the IH job properly, the contribution is
one-way: from economics to history and not the other way. This kind of
study, interesting as it is to most members of the HES including me, can be
of little or no value to working economists whose business is to apply the
current techniques of their discipline to present-day, real-world problems.
The Australian bureacrats are right to dismiss it.
But if we agree that HET may legitimately include the history of
economic analysis (HEA), what Mark Blaug called 'Economic Theory in
Retrospect, then the story is quite different and the answer is 'Yes'. HEA
becomes an in-house activity of economists themselves, what Paul Feyerabend
(Against Method, 1988, p. 21) described as the process by which 'the history
of a science becomes an inseparable part of the science itself . . .
essential for its further development as well as giving content to the
theories it contains at any particular moment'. It goes without saying that
this kind of study can only be fruitfully undertaken by highly-trained
economic theorists, well aware of the conceptual problems currently
afflicting their discipline: authors such as Cannan, Schumpeter, Stigler,
Blaug - - - and Samuelson! This brings me to my other point.
2. Is Paul Samuelson an historian of economic thought?
If we are talking about IH, 'No'. If we are talking about HEA, 'Yes'.
That Samuelson's is the most powerful mind to concern itself with
economics in the 20th C will be agreed by most. That Samuelson has been
deeply learned in the past history of our discipline for most of his life
will be understood by any who have taken a look at Foundations (1947): which
contains references to his predecessors from Barone, Bastiat, Bentham,
Bohm-Bawerk, Bortkiewicz, Cannan, Cassels . . . to Senior, Sidgwick,
Slutsky, Smith, Thunen, Veblen, Walras, Wicksell and Allyn Young. It is
quite characteristic of his intellectual style that in that book he should
have sought an illustration of the merely mathematical concept of one-sided
stability-instabilty from Malthus's famous 'ratios: thereby inadvertently
pioneering the 'production function' approach to the rational reconstruction
of 'classical' economic analysis later exploited by Stigler, Baumol,
Passinetti and many others. Samuelson's Presidential Address to the AEA in
1961 was on 'Economists and the History of Ideas'. It is reprinted as the
first of eight 'Essays in the History of Economics' in Volume 2 of his
Collected Scientific Papers. The four essays on Ricardo and Marx reprinted
in Volume 1 date from 1959-60. Since that date, Samuelson has continued a
steady stream of articles in HEA, many -- including the 1978 piece on the
'Canonical Classical Model' that Sam so unwisely allowed himself to sneer
at -- of great explanatory power. Any who suspect that at the age of 92
Samuelson thinks he is yet in his 'dotage' ought to take a look at his
vigorous exchange with Garegnani in the latest number of European Journal of
the History of Economic Thought. (Vol 14, No 2, June 2007). Though I
haven't weighted and measured, I am inclined to believe that Paul
Samuelson's contributions to the history of economic thought (HEA division!)
over the last sixty years are greater than those of any other living
scholar. (And of course it is only a tiny part of his total output.)
There is a moral to all this that I can't forebear from pointing out. If
'history of economic thought' really does belong in 'economics', it is
Samuelson's HEA, rather than the 'contextual' IH of Montes and Schliesser
and their colleagues which we all love so much.
Anthony Waterman
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