HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
IS IT "HISTORY" OR "ECONOMICS"?
University of Manitoba
Economics Departmental Conference
Delta Marsh Field Station
29-30 September 1995
The Manitoba department's annual conference this year focused on
the history of economic thought. The background for the theme was
the department's potential reevaluation of its resource
commitment to history of economics in the face of declining
budgets and program cuts (Manitoba is a relatively eclectic
department with three members publishing in the history of
economic thought--Forget, Chernomas, and Waterman--and several
others who have enough training to teach the field at the
undergraduate level; history of thought is currently required).
How important is the history of economic thought for training
economics students (at both undergraduate and graduate levels)
relative to other program requirements?
Invited guests were Warren Samuels and Ross Emmett (a Manitoba
graduate). Departmental contributions were provided by Norm
Cameron and Evelyn Forget. The four papers were distributed
ahead of time, enabling greater discussion time at the sessions.
Roughly 2/3's of the department attended, along with 6 graduate
students. Total attendance was about 30 persons. Five 1 and 1/2
hour plenary sessions were held over 24 hours, beginning on
Friday evening and ending late Saturday afternoon. The setting
was the University's biological field station on the bank of the
south end of Lake Manitoba. With beautiful fall weather, the
southern migration of geese over the lake, and wonderful fall
colours, the setting couldn't have been better (for the
prairies!).
Warren Samuels began the conference with an open discussion based
on his paper "The Work of Historians of Economic Thought." Rather
than seeking to defend the relative merits of study in the
history of economic thought, Warren used the strategy of
articulating the wide range of activities that historians of
economic thought engage in. As historians of *economic thought*,
we tell stories of the discipline's intellectual development--
often intended to either provide a justification for current
theoretical concerns or recover past diversity lost in the
concerns of contemporary hegemony, and rationally reconstruct
older ideas and theories which can provide contemporary insights
or form the basis for new work. As historians of *economics*, we
study the practices of the discipline (the exclusion/inclusion of
individuals, structure of schools, educational training, etc.),
the origin and adoption of theories, and the relation of ideas to
their contexts (e.g., personal biography, historical time period,
and the "various networks and filiations that have existed and
continue to exist"). As *historians*, we take care to recover and
preserve archival materials; we also realize that we construct
history, and bring to that construction our own interests and
theoretical concerns. Throughout his paper, and the discussion of
it, Warren stressed the breadth of perspective and method gained
by the participation of historians of economic thought in the
economics discipline.
The discussion of Warren's paper set out fairly clearly the
central issues of the weekend. Sympathetic to the history of
economic thought both as a set of professional activities and as
an essential part of an economist's training, department members
focused on the merits of its inclusion in the required core of
the department's curriculum relative to other required training
(in econometrics, for example). Good economists all, they asked
what the opportunity cost of devoting significant departmental
resources to the history of economic thought was, given the
reality of shrinking budgets and possibly fewer faculty
positions. One question that appeared during the opening
discussion, and then again later, was the relative merits of
focusing attention on the history of economic thought in a
separate course versus including some attention to it in a
variety of courses (from reading Heilbroner, Fusfeld, etc. in
first year, to assigning classic texts in some of the sub-
fields). No consensus emerged on that question over the weekend.
Another theme raised that evening that recurred several times
over the weekend was the curricular role of a history of economic
thought course in providing students with the "ah-ha" experience
of seeing a unified vision of what economics was all about.
Saturday morning there were two sessions. At the first, Evelyn
Forget outlined the merits of studying the history of economic
thought in her presentation: "Why should a professional economist
study the history of economic thought?" Beginning with the
premise that economists often see no merit in studying the
"absurd opinions and doctrines which have been denounced"
(quotation from Say), Evelyn articulated a number of benefits to
be gained by the study of the history of economic thought. As
theorists, the study of the history of economic thought helps us
in several ways: it helps us to see economic theory as a living
and evolving entity; it provides students with another
opportunity to practice economic analysis; it teaches
intellectual humility; it makes us aware that economic theories
are constructed at particular points in time and place, and often
for particular purposes; and it helps us to recover lost ideas
that are often vital at times of dispute in the contemporary
discipline. As professional economists, the study of the history
of economic thought provides several other things: it is one of
the places where students of economics learn to communicate with
non-economists; it makes one aware of the different types of
evidence or data relevant to a problem; and it teaches us that
economics is part of a larger conversation. Evelyn concluded with
the suggestion that the study of the history of economic thought
also makes us better people: "What could be better than producing
students who can read and write, who have respect and regard for
the accomplishments of other people and other intellectual
traditions, who have a healthy skepticism about the 'truth value'
of what we profess but, simultaneously, recognize that we do have
valuable insights to share? What is better than producing
students who look toward the accomplishments of an ever evolving
future with a solid grounding in the insights of the past?"
The other morning session focused on Norman Cameron's paper: "The
history of economic thought: progress or cycle [a suggested
alternative was "progress or Poisson distribution"]?" Norm
provided a "Colanderesque" account of macroeconomic thought in
postwar North America, based on the notion that the evolution of
macroeconomic ideas are explicable in terms of the operation of
the demand and supply of ideas within the institutional framework
of a discipline's leading graduate schools. In such a market,
"the only visible product of a new approach for several decades
may be its own replication. The invisible hand . . . may produce
outcomes more commonly the result of invisible parasites." Norm's
paper provided the occasion for two related discussions. The
first focused on a theme that had recurred throughout the earlier
discussions; namely, that if the criteria of truth-seeking were
efficient contemporary scientific theory would encapsulate all
that was right in past theory (the point is usually made by
asking "does chemistry or physics need its history?"). Norm's
paper suggested that the criteria of success in the institutional
framework of the academic market are not the criteria of truth-
seeking (reputation and self-promotion are the central interests,
not truth), and hence, that there is no guarantee that present
theory will encapsulate anything from the past. The second
discussion raised here regarded postmodernism. Norm resisted the
ascription; Warren and Ross argued that his paper opened the door
for the postmodern turn by making scientific practice the object
of study, by pointing out the multiplicity of criteria at work in
scientific practice, and by providing a non-equilibrating account
of the scientific practice of economists.
After lunch and time for a walk on the lakeshore, the
participants settled in for Ross Emmett's presentation:
"Reflections on 'Breaking Away': Economics as Science and the
History of Economics as History of Science." Responding to
Margaret Schabas' 1992 *HOPE* article on the relation of the
history of economics to the history of science, Ross provided a
framework for distinguishing between the history of economic
thought and the history of economics (an argument HES subscribers
might remember from a discussion in the spring) and then
considered some of the distinction's implications for historians
of economics. Focusing on the discursive elements of scientific
practice, Ross argued that the history of economic thought is an
integral part of economic theory because it engages the theory's
tradition of discussion from the standpoint of contemporary
theoretical conversation (in an earlier discussion, Ross
suggested that a history of economic thought course is the
students' theory course; what most "theory" courses do is apply
math to that theory); the history of economics, on the other
hand, is a part of the discipline of intellectual history, in
that it attempts to provide a historical identity for economic
ideas and practices (If you have read this far, you will realize
that Ross and Warren made similar distinctions in their papers).
After pointing out the difference between his argument for the
integral relation between the history of economic thought and
economic science and the argument that the history of economic
thought is integral to economics because economics is a social
science (implying that natural sciences don't need their history
of scientific thought), Ross went on to question whether the
history of science provided the only other context for historians
of economics. Here he pointed to intellectual history, social and
cultural history, the sociology of knowledge, and even economics
as providing (possibly alternative) explanatory frameworks for
the explanation of the ideas and practices of economics.
The conference closed with a general discussion about the themes
that had emerged during the sessions. Much of that discussion
focused on whether the history of economic thought provided the
only course in which students gained that vision of what
economics was about that an economics program should presumably
provide.
Ross B. Emmett, Augustana University College, Camrose, Alberta
CANADA T4V 2R3 voice: (403) 679-1517 fax: (403) 679-1129
e-mail: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
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