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Roy Weintraub wrote:  
 
> A less paranoid, or conspiritorial, view of the matter would argue 
> that someone like Arrow, engaged in his own projects, constructing 
> his own linkages among ideas, allies, theories, data, tools, 
> concepts -- deploying his own troops in Latour-Callon  networks -- 
> understands Hayek only though his own Arrow-world, one he projects as 
> it were onto Hayek. For Arrow is not an historian, obligated to 
> understand another's views from the inside: he is an economist, a 
> kind of scientist, obligated to make sense of his world with tools 
> brought along and remade, and ideas learned and reforged. To assert 
> that Arrow would have been better off abandoning his own projects, 
> and taking up Hayek's, is just silly. 
 
In these words, Roy expresses a particular view of the development of 
the field of "economics." He seems to think that the field can "develop" 
even though major players ignore, disregard, or fail to put forth a good 
faith effort to understand the work of their predecessors and 
contemporaries. (Of course, I am not referring to any particular 
"economist" here.) 
 
No doubt the "field" can develop in this way. However, to the extent 
that it does, we cannot in good conscience attach any particular label 
(e.g., "economics") to it. 
 
Roy's view of the matter reflects the apparent dominant view among 
HESers that the history of economics is the history of people who claim 
to be economists or who write or speak about things that someone claims 
to be economics. His view also seems to be the view of the broader 
profession of university economists. If this is so, then it is little 
wonder that the history of economic thought has increasingly been 
relegated to the sidelines in typical economics departments at 
universities. If one brand of economics is as good as another, why waste 
time studying all the brands? 
 
--  
Pat Gunning 
http://www.showtower.com.tw/~gunning/welcome.htm 
http://web.nchulc.edu.tw/~gunning/pat/welcome 
 
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