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In response to Peter's reply to Roy: 
 
Your mention of Rob Leonard's work is I think illustrative of Roy's point 
-- economists will pay attention to work that does history well. Rob's 
invitation to write for the JEL (an article that won the HES "best 
article" prize this year, BTW) is indicative of the audience his work, 
and others like it, receives from the economics mainstream. This is what 
Roy said about the physicists recognizing good work in the history of 
physics (only when the standards of the history of economics are those of 
good history "will the interests of economists be engaged by the history of 
their discipline, and their discipline's ideas, in the same respectful way 
that physicists and mathematicians purchase and read histories of physics 
and mathematics"). 
 
Your mention of Malcolm's work is also interesting. In our discussion so 
far, we have focused on the difference between history of doctrine and 
history of analysis (or historical reconstruction and rational 
reconstruction, as I prefer). But there is another type of historical 
writing which bridges the gap between the historian and the practioner. 
Richard Rorty called it geistesgeschichte, and I can think of no better 
word, so that's what I use. Because I also think in concrete examples, 
I'll use the geistesgeschichte I'm most familiar with: MacIntyre's _After 
Virtue_. In that book MacIntyre challenges the contemporary questions of 
philosophical ethics via a reconstruction of the questions philosophers 
have asked over the years. His argument that we have reached an impass and 
need to go back and reconfigure the basic questions we ask in order to 
move around that impass is simultaneously a historical and theoretical 
question. He engages the "extended present" as you call it for the 
purposes of the future by shifting the ground upon which the contemporary 
theorist works. 
 
In economics we occasionally have excellent geistesgeschichte. Recent 
examples include Malcolm's book and Phil's book (in my estimation, 
anyway). 
 
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 
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URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmettr 
 
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