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There may be too many strands of the discussion about Roy's 
editorial for me to jump in now, but I have written about 
Roy's topic for several year's now (reviews, articles, a book) 
and the discussion has spurred many thoughts for me. 
 
I agree completely with Roy that we need to raise the standards 
of the history of thought that is written by economists. Many people 
have achieved this -- Bill Barber, for instance -- but most of what is 
written is thin history and so is not persuasive to anyone, not even 
the mainstream economists that some historians of thought believe will 
be influenced by it. I think that the picture Ted Porter painted of what 
most of us do is quite accurate. 
 
My differences with Roy center around his idea that Margaret Schabas's 
idea that we all "Break Away" and go to History of Science Departments 
is appropriate or necessary. For one thing, I think that Schabas's 
and Mirowski's focus on the history of science is too narrow and 
constraining. The history of science is a great place to sharpen 
one's critical acumen, and if Margaret and Phil were not there 
writing about  economics from the perspective of the history of 
science we would all be less challenged, less informed, and generally 
less well off. But why, for goodness sake, would we all want to 
restrict ourselves to that one particular type of history? 
 
In my own work on Keynes, I learned more from Peter Clarke, a 
political historian, than from anyone else. It helped that he 
had written a book about Keynes, and that this forced me to see 
how a "real" historian would treat my subject. But as I followed 
the literature, I saw lots of other important things that helped 
me to improve and change the way I did my own work. Read, for 
instance, Freeden's work on the New Liberalism, or Ewen Green's 
recent book, "The Crisis of Conservativism" and you'll see what 
I'm talking about. There are very good historians out there who 
write about ideas in ways that would help all us to think more 
critically about what we do. 
 
Reading stuff like Clarke's and Green's also provided me with a 
a point of view that I think would match the interests of most 
historians of thought (who reside in economics depts.) much better 
than the point of view of historians of science. Are you interested 
in how ideas are used/not used in the world? How they are changed by 
the process of application and debate? Then look beyond the history 
of science. The best collection of essays I ever read on Keynesian 
economics is edited by a political scientist, Peter Hall, and contains 
work by sociologists, historians, economists, and political scientists. 
Not one historian of science in the crowd. (The title of this book 
is "Keynesianism Across Nations: The Political Power of Economic Ideas.") 
The point of view in this kind of literature is much more engaged with 
policy questions than what I see in the history of science literature. 
In fact, I get the idea from most historians of science that they could 
care less whether scientists read what they write; this casual observation 
made me wonder about Roy's admonition that we could only hope to be 
read by other economists the way that h. of sc. is read by scientists. 
Greg's example of Darwinian biolgy, notwithstanding, I don't think 
that h. of sc. has much purchase among scientists (or that the historians 
care). 
 
My own work has drawn from political history, the history of ideas 
(history of philosophy), literary history, economic history, and, at 
the moment, church history. I can't guess what type of history will 
most benefit someone else's work, but I agree with Roger Backhouse that 
we will write better history if we draw (critically) from all historical 
discussions and shape our arguments and stories in way that is satisfying 
to others who want to talk with us. When I got down to the hard work of 
writing my book on Keynes, I wanted to write in way that would be 
interesting and compelling to all the communities that I had engaged 
in my research. I wanted Peter Clarke to read it and see why I disagreed 
with him and I wanted Tom Baldwin (a philosopher who has written 
extensively about G.E. Moore) to see that I could push some of his 
ideas into a further realm. So I wrote for them and asked them for comments 
on what I wrote. It's that simple. Or difficult! 
 
But in the end, I am with Roger Backhouse (and others): I want economists 
to read my work. This is perhaps a triumph of hope over experience, but I 
try to write something that will allow economists to see the power and 
value of historical thinking in doing their own work. Right now, I happen 
to think that this can't be done with the kind of tired old Whig histories 
that George Stigler and his (intellectual) progeny have been offering us 
for the last 30 years. In the abstract, this kind of history must have 
value, I suppose. But in the actual moment, I see it as a sorry aping 
of what the theorists do and an effort to appease them and win their 
approval. Guess what? They're not clapping. 
 
I apologize for going on so long. And I apologize for not addressing 
everyone's points. 
 
Brad Bateman 
Department of Economics 
Grinnell College 
 
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