Dimand wrote: 
 
But of course truncated influences are, if anything, harder to trace than 
influences which actually continued to convey their germ down 
academic generations! 
 
I disagree: I take as my text Bruno Latour who argued that  
"The status of a statement depends on later statements. It is made  
more of a certainty or less of a certainty depending on the next  
sentence that takes it up; this retrospective attribhution is  
repeated for this next new sentence, which in turn might be more of a  
fact or more of a fiction by a third, and so on...Since the staus of  
a claim depends on later user's insertions, what if there are no  
later users whatsoever? This is the point that people who never come  
close to the fabrication of science have the greatest difficulty in  
grasping. They imagine that all scientific articles are equal and  
are arrayed in lines like soldiers, to be carefully inspected one by  
one. However most papers are never read at all. No matter what a  
paper did to the former literature, if no one else does anything else  
with it, then it is as if it had never existed at all. You may have  
written a paper that settles a fierce controversy once and for all,  
but if readers ignore it it cannot be turned into a fact; it simply  
cannot." (Bruno Latour, Science in Action, 1897, 27-28, 40) 
 
Put simply in the present context, precursor searches, among   
dead white females' writings on economics, specifically  
writings which had no effect on the subdisciplinary community of  
scholars, have no narrative power. They may be of interest as rational  
reconstructions of the history, or as historical reconstructions of  
the local and contingent circumstances of the construction of the  
writings themselves, but we all are, by now, aware of the  
historiographic deadend of such rational reconstructions of the  
development of science. That is, to argue Harriet Martineau did or did  
not discover X for the first time but economics  had to wait N years  
for X to be rediscoved is to misconceive the enterprise of doing  
economics itself. A story of Martineau and her discussion of X is or  
can be interesting and excellent history, but precursor hunts are  
simply a reminder that "There is no new thing under the sun" well  
known since Ecclesiastes, about B.C 977. 
 
E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics 
Duke University, Box 90097 
Durham, North Carolina 27708-0097 
 
Phone and voicemail: (919) 660-1838  
Fax: (919) 684-8974 
E-mail: [log in to unmask] 
Web Site: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html