================= HES POSTING ================= 
 
First a positive reply to Roy, expressing the core of my agreement with 
him; then a negative response, identifying an area of potential 
disagreement: 
 
The root issue of Roy's editorial is that contributions to History of 
Economics are defined by the criteria or standards "employed by 
professional historians to evaluate and appraise historical writing." 
***With this I fully agree.*** Lest my agreement with Roy be overlooked 
in the second part of this message where I express some reservation, let 
me say that I no longer identify myself as an "economist" in conversations 
about my research with other academics and the general public -- I 
identify myself as either an "intellectual historian" or an "historian of 
science." While most of my listeners often "get the message" that they 
need not ask me about interest rate trends and whether they should lock in 
their mortgages (who would ask a historian those questions?), some also 
recognize from my identification that my research is not driven by the 
criteria of economic analysis (I would not deny that I have a 
historiographic agenda, however!). 
 
Now on to the area of potential disagreement. I think Roy too quickly 
gives away to neoclassical economists a model of scientific theorizing 
which confirms the suspicion that "old" ideas are either already 
corrected or dead. In most of the other social sciences, "theory" courses 
are an amalgamation of historical and rational reconstructions (what 
someone in an earlier reply to Roy called history of doctrine and history 
of analysis) of classic "texts" in the field, and contemporary theorists 
orient their work in relation to those "texts." And as Greg Ransom pointed 
out, rational reconstructions of the Darwinian tradition are alive and 
well in biological theory. Perhaps the absence of powerful rational 
reconstructions in contemporary physical or chemical theory are more a 
sign of the contemporary *uniformity of agreement across those 
disciplines* than an indication that the conversational tradition in a 
so-called scientific discipline is more irrelevant to its present than it 
is in the humanities. And can economics really claim the *uniformity of 
agreement* that renders it unnecessary to recover lost elements of the 
conversational tradition? [I think not personally.] 
 
Finally, let me add that my potential disagreement with Roy is not a call 
to a "subversive" rehistoricizing of the economics profession. If I wanted 
to do that, I would have become an economic historian, not an historian of 
economics -- the opportunities to draw history back into the economics 
profession are much more promising there and in the New Institutionalism. 
I am a historian of economics because I want to explain the discipline of 
economics in the twentieth century. [Full stop] 
 
Ross 
 
 
Ross B. Emmett                Editor, HES and Co-manager CIRLA-L 
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] 
URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmettr 
 
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