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I was struck by the similiarity between Dan Hammond's critique of  
"absolutist" approaches to taxonomy (illustrated by histories of the  
quantity theory) and Quentin Skinner's historiographic writings  
(especially "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,"  
originally published in 1969 and reprinted in _Meaning and Context:  
Quentin Skinner and His Critics,_ edited by James Tully -- see my review  
of this book in _HOPE_ 24 (Spring 1992). The point made by Dan, and by  
Skinner, is relevant to our discussions in the fall regarding  
contextualization and the problems with the search for a universal,  
unchanging set of ideas that are called "economic" (see Alborn's editorial  
as well). 
 
The point where Hammond and Skinner come closest is in Dan's remark: 
 
> One of the practices, which I will mention without documentation, is a 
> tendency on the part of historians writing about Friedman's work to  
> present a composite picture of Friedman's ideas that is made from bits  
> and pieces of his writings from disparate points in his career. At best  
> this portrayal of Friedman's ideas, say on monetary economics, is a sort  
> of "average" observation over the course of his career. At worst, it  
> gives a misleading picture of what he believed at any particular time.  
> The practice is ahistorical in the sense that it strips away the  
> historical/biographical development of Friedman's thought. 
 
Skinner identifies this tendency as the "mythology of coherence": the 
myth that authors possess coherent intellectual systems which undergird 
their writings throughout the entirety of their lifes. Skinner points  
out that some historians of ideas take these coherent systems as  
monolithic "general positions" into which everything the author writes  
must be fit, and from which everything the author write must be  
interpreted (my touchstone for this mythology is Stigler's "Textual  
Exegesis as a Scientific Problem"). As Hammond's editorial suggests, the  
quest for mythologies of coherence still runs deep in the history of  
economic thought. 
 
The other problem Hammond identifies in histories of the quantity theory  
is also related Skinner's work. Hammond critiques the effort to search  
through the history of economic thought for examples of scholars who hold  
to the quantity theory. His critique focuses on how this tendency  
arbitrarily fixes the doctrine of a quantity theory in ways which do not  
reflect the use of the theory by theorists at particular moments and in  
particular contexts. Skinner critiques the same tendency, calling it the  
"mythology of doctrine" -- the search for everyone who wrote something on  
a topic of contemporary interest, under the false impression that any  
particular idea remains stable over all time, and does not evolve through  
use in particular contexts. 
 
Both Skinner and Hammond point us in the direction Tim Alborn indicated 
in the last editorial -- examining how particular people/groups at 
particular times used words, rather than seeking to extract ideas/theories  
which are somehow universal. 
 
 
Ross B. Emmett                Editor, HES and CIRLA-L 
Augustana University College 
e-mail: [log in to unmask] 
URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmer 
 
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