------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History

Published by EH.Net (May 2012)

Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic
History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. xi + 216 pp.
$39.50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-14400-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Enrico Petracca, Departments of Philosophy and
Economics, University of Bologna.

In a well-known passage quoted by Carlo M. Cipolla (1991), the ancient
historian Arnaldo Momigliano wrote: “The historian works on the
assumption that he is capable of reconstructing and understanding the
events of the past. If an epistemologist manages to convince him that
this is not so, the historian should change profession.” More
difficult – but to a certain extent more interesting – would be the
possibility that a historian be convinced to give up his own way of
doing history by another historian.

Francesco Boldizzoni (University of Turin) belongs to a younger
generation of Italian scholars and his training in both history and
economics makes him “familiar with the tricks of the trade” (p. x).
The Poverty of Clio is meant to give voice to an increasing sense of
dissatisfaction within the economic history profession. The subject,
the author says, is undergoing a “deep identity crisis” (p. 4) brought
about by the spread of the U.S.-born “New Economic History” – or, as
it is also labeled, “cliometrics” – worldwide, and across Europe in
particular.

At the root of such an identity crisis one might be tempted to see the
usual struggle between Modernists and Traditionalists – a kind of
prototypic Analytic/Continental divide (letting Britain out for this
time) opposing the prophets of generalization, equipped with a “hard”
deductive apparatus, on one side, and inductivists and bookworms,
always ready to stress the importance of context-dependent
specificities, on the other. This, however, would be a rather
misleading representation of the book, being neither its starting
point nor its center of gravity. In fact, Boldizzoni proposes to test
contemporary cliometric history-writing against what (economic)
historians should do, that is, “throw[ing] light on the workings of
societies that differ to varying degrees from our own” (p. 5). This is
the book’s working heuristic. The volume then ends up by revealing the
“unconfessed” (p. 5) aims of cliometrics that, along with its
methodological faults, contradict its repeated claims to
“scientificity.”

Common to various strands of cliometrics “is an ideological slant,
whether conscious or unconscious, aimed at exalting values such as
individualism and materialism, which are typical of certain segments
of contemporary Western society, and at projecting them unduly onto
the past” (p. 55). Yet relying on an ideological background is not in
itself an irreparable vulnus: “In the twentieth century,” Boldizzoni
writes, “Marxism and liberalism produced influential paradigms and
informed the work of hundreds of scholars, but this influence was
generally kept within the limits of decency and only rarely did it go
so far as to pervert the work of the historian” (p. 7, italics added).
Cliometrics transcends traditional forms of Whig history in that the
ideological element here goes so far as to render historical analysis
unhistorical, and therefore by definition nonhistory.

This perversion stems from an imbalanced marriage between history and
economics – the “two cultures” that Cipolla spoke about – in which the
latter absorbs the former. Not by chance, the term “perversion” echoes
the title of a well-known article of William Cunningham (1892) in the
context of his debate with Alfred Marshall on the methodology of
economic history and its relationship with economics (see Hodgson
2001). But what is cliometrics? What are its boundaries? According to
Boldizzoni, cliometrics “has evolved into a literary genre having
little to do with numbers in the sense of econometric testing,” as the
vulgata would claim, “though a lot to do with the deductive stance of
the new institutional economics and of rational choice theory. At
times these two approaches, which are not completely compatible,
coexist even in the same author, giving rise to a sort of analytical
schizophrenia” (p. 54).

Despite the eclecticism that characterizes current varieties of
U.S.-style economic history, a common thread may be identified. The
search for this thread and the discussion of its implications for the
discipline is the most enjoyable part of the book.

Cliometrics has changed over the past sixty years, and Boldizzoni
explores these changes thoroughly, starting from the first generation
of practitioners, including Nobel laureates Robert Fogel and Douglass
North, up to Avner Greif and Gregory Clark, just to mention two recent
best-selling authors. In order to show their inability to deal with
historical complexity, Boldizzoni proposes a simple test: are
cliometric analyses historically accurate or do they lead to
fictitious narratives? Many examples of serious faults and mistakes
are given: the most interesting and revealing – treated at length in
chapter 3 – is perhaps the case of Avner Greif’s incautious handling
of primary sources and particularly his wrong translations from the
Codice Diplomatico della Repubblica di Genova (2006, pp. 58-60),
leading to an anachronistic representation of Western medieval
individualism. The question that this example inevitably raises is
whether history is for cliometrics an actual domain of analysis or
rather a mere aggregate of facts to pick up in order to validate a
theory.

At a deeper level is the criticism of cliometrics in its, let us say,
obsession for the price-making market interpreted as the only natural
allocation system, to which the humankind has always tended. Rational
choice accounts of the past see markets and maximizing actors
everywhere, while new institutional narratives focus on
“institutional” constraints that have prevented perfect market
functioning. According to Boldizzoni they are biased by “the same
ethnocentric naturalism, which assigns a moral value to the
differences in income, wealth, and development existing in the world,
and traces them back to a pre-established order. Such differences are
a confirmation of the superiority of the order incarnated by the
political and economic constitution of liberal democracies” (p. 63).

This book, however, is for the most part construens. The intriguing
question “is it possible to practice a different kind of economic
history from cliometrics, without lapsing into narrative history?”
leads to the answer that “a third way is possible and, indeed, was
already being extensively applied in the second half of the twentieth
century” (p. 86). Boldizzoni has in mind a wide range of outstanding
historians and social scientists, among who are Witold Kula, Moses
Finley and Marshall Sahlins. But a prominent place is accorded to the
rich and articulated tradition of the Annales school. While revisiting
and reappraising its contributions, he points out its distinguishing
features. The most important relates to the definition of historical
knowledge provided by Marc Bloch, the co-founder of the school, not as
the “science of the past,” but rather as the “science of men in time”
(Bloch 1954). This concise definition, Boldizzoni claims, embodies the
essential element of any reconstruction of the past that can be
regarded as history: its focus on human societies and their changes
across time and space. The twentieth-century Annalistes developed a
methodology that is consistent with this definition, fostering
interactions with a wide range of disciplines on the ground of
historical model-building.

Against this background, Boldizzoni sets out a Manifesto (pp.150-52)
for the renewal of economic history. The main desiderata would be 1)
an “adherence to primary sources”; 2) an attention for the “historical
background”, i.e. economic facts should be contextualized within the
broader picture; 3) “the careful choice of friends”: economic
sociology and anthropology should replace mainstream economics; 4) “a
different use of quantitative techniques”, i.e. inductive statistics
rather than methodologies based on deduction or probability. Point 5),
“a different relationship with theory,” advocates an epistemic pathway
for economic history where a continuous interplay is realized between
primary sources and the economic historian’s “metatheory,” which “is a
much more general, flexible, and open construction than a specific
theory. It is something similar to a Weltanschauung” (p. 151). The
whole procedure is considered an alternative to the cliometric method
whereby the “historical narrative” (the output) emerges as a mere
consequence of the application of theories and concepts borrowed from
neoclassical and/or new institutional economics and their
superimposition on historical data and facts.

Finally, let me add a personal consideration. At the end of the book
(p. 155-58) it is noticed how the research agenda in economic history
has recently switched from production to consumption – an evolution
that does not seem to me either neutral or natural in any sense. This
replicates to some extent the fundamental dichotomy between the
(classical and Keynesian) “production paradigm” and the (neoclassical)
“exchange paradigm” in economics (Pasinetti, 2007). The switch from
production to consumption attests, once more, the neoclassical
blueprint on current economic history research.

References:

Bloch, M. (1954) The Historian’s Craft, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Cipolla, C.M. (1991) Between Two Cultures: An Introduction to Economic
History, New York: W.W. Norton.

Cunningham, W.  (1892) “The Perversion of Economic History,” Economic
Journal, 2(7), pp. 491-506.

Greif, A. (2006) Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy:
Lessons from Medieval Trade, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hodgson, G. (2001) How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of
Historical Specificity in Social Science, London: Routledge.

Pasinetti, L.L. (2007) Keynes and the Cambridge Keynesians: A
‘Revolution in Economics’ to be Accomplished, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press

Enrico Petracca is a Ph.D. candidate at the Departments of Philosophy
and Economics of the University of Bologna. His M.Sc. thesis Economic
Theory and Economic History: Controversies on Method was awarded the
Manlio Resta Prize (2010) as the best Italian dissertation in
economics.  E-mail: [log in to unmask]

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Geographic Location: General, International, or Comparative
Subject: Development of the Economic History Discipline:
Historiography; Sources and Methods
Time: General or Comparative