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What defines a legitimate contribution to the subdiscipline `The History 
 of Economics'? 
 
In late twentieth-century departments of economics, all individuals who 
resort on occasion to modes of argument which employ historical devices 
or who in their work quote or comment on Keynes, Marx, Veblen, et 
al., are regarded by their economics departmental colleagues as de facto 
historians of economics; sometimes even those individuals believe 
themselves to be historians of economics if they quote or comment upon 
Keynes, Marx, Veblen, et al. 
 
I submit that such individuals should not be so regarded, and that 
their work, however valuable as economics, does not constitute 
a legitimate contribution to the history of economics. 
 
In her 1992 HOPE essay "Breaking Away," Margaret Schabas 
wrote "there is now, however, an entire generation of professional 
economists who have probably never read Marshall or Keynes, and who 
probably only have a superficial understanding of either the 
history of economics or economic history. This suggests that economists, 
at least in the United States, are now no more likely to develop historical 
intuitions than physicists or physiologists. In short, the umbilical cord 
has been broken.  Economists, by insisting on technical progress, have 
lost the means to think historically and thus will no longer cultivate an 
affinity for the history of economics, or at least a non-Whiggish history 
of economics. Historians of economics must someday come to terms 
with this conceptual barrier.  As I see it, they might as well break 
away and form an alliance with historians of science." (page 197) 
 
Yet whether or not the community of historians of economics breaks 
away from the community of economists to seek a home, as the 
historians of physics have, within departments of history or history 
of science programs, the standards by which a piece of work in the 
history of economics must be judged are the standards by which a 
piece of work in the history of physics should be judged or by which 
a piece of work in the history of molecular biology should be judged: 
specifically, the standards are those employed by professional 
historians to evaluate and appraise historical writing.  In order to 
graduate with a doctoral degree from a recognized history program, 
one must demonstrate in the written work a command of the research 
skills of an historian, and the craft to write, that is to interpret, the 
various primary and secondary sources. 
 
As Ted Porter noted, in his comment on Schabas's piece:  "[T]echnical 
history, after all, has often served an apologetic function.  This, I must 
emphasize, is by now greatly attenuated in historical studies of natural 
science.  I regret to add that history as legitimation is still very strong in 
the history of economics.  And this, I think, may be the decisive reason 
why historical work on recent economics has made so little impression 
on a generation of historians who insist on their autonomy from science. 
Unfortunately, many historians of economics are so completely 
socialized as economists, and so little as historians, that the genre 
of historical study is not fully distinct from that of the review essay. 
The review essay surveys a field and assigns credit, almost always on 
the assumption that knowledge is steadily progressing.  Far too much 
history of economics, still, aims to extend the review back twenty 
or fifty years by presenting the ideas of the economist on some 
modern question.  The precursor, long dismissed as a category 
mistake in history of science, is still alive and well in economics, 
and this is almost inevitable so long as history of economics is written 
to meet the standards and presuppositions of ahistorical economists." 
(page 235) 
 
It is not as if the perspective I urge is alien to economists, for it is 
precisely the model that has been established in the subdiscipline of 
economic history.  That is, many economic historians hold joint 
appointments in departments of economics and departments of history. 
Sometimes economic historians have their primary affiliation with 
history departments. Nonetheless, the standards for writing and 
publishing and professional acceptance in the discipline of economic 
history are different from the standards of the subdisciplines of labor 
economics or international trade, or economic demography, or Post 
Keynesian economics. 
 
Informed by the historians' notions of evidence and modes of employing 
evidence in argument, for economic historians the standards of 
scholarship conform to historians' ideas of research, researchability, 
and rhetoric which employ those research results in the construction 
of argument.  And I observe that Robert Fogel, Gavin Wright, and 
Robert Gallman have a position within the field of American history 
which appears not to not tarnish their standing within the economics 
profession. 
 
I retain the hope that over time writing and research in the history 
of economic thought will approach the standards of historical writing 
in the history of physics or the history of mathematics or the history 
of medicine, for I believe that only then 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.  Thus I look forward to 
a time when as many economists have read Groenewegen's biography 
of Alfred Marshall, or Ingrao and Israel's history of equilibrium 
theory as physicists have read Westfall's biography of Newton, 
or statisticians have read Stigler's history of statistics, or biologists 
have read Judson's history of molecular biology. 
 
E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics 
Director, Center for Social and Historical Studies of Science 
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] 
URL: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html 
 
 
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