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A current discussion on EH.TEACH seems of relevance to our recent  
discussion of Roy's editorial, and the different objectives of the  
communities of historians and economists. 
 
The conversation emerged out of a review of _Economics and the Historian_, 
edited by Thomas G. Rawski.  Berkeley: (University of California Press, 
1996). The review was written by Michael Dintenfass, University of 
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For the review see:  
http://cs.muohio.edu/Archives/eh.teach/sep-96/0029.html 
 
In his review, Dintenfass suggests that _Economics and the Historian_ will  
not be the success its contributors hope for, because the gap between  
historians and economists is greater than they estimate it to be. After  
illustrating how difficult it would be for a contemporary historian to  
read articles in economic history journals, Dintenfass also points out how  
shocked the economic historian would be to read contemporary history  
journals: 
 
"Whereas fifteen years ago social history, with its structuralist and 
materialist inflections, was in the ascendant, it is a linguistically 
inspired cultural history that today enjoys Clio's favor.  The concern 
with movements, forces, and conditions has given way to a preoccupation 
with identities, memories, and representations as the making of the self 
has claimed priority over the prosecution of its interests." 
 
Dintenfass then goes on to say: 
 
"The premise on which Rawski and his colleagues proceed, however, is that 
the gap between history and economics is merely a problem of 
accessibility. . . . Sadly, they fail to recognize that the concerns of 
many historians nowadays are far removed from those of economists and that 
speaking in a language historians can understand will not be enough to 
inspire a substantive dialogue between them." 
 
Dintenfass' review prompted the question: what then is a history focused  
on identity and the making of the self? 
 
Today, Dintenfass replied with the following: 
 
"Let me turn now to what I regard as a far more important issue:  
the making of the self and its relation to economic history.  I did not  
compose my review as the spokesman for historians of identities,  
memories, and representations.  It is therefore not for me to identify  
the core research agenda of the history of subjectivities.  I can only  
articulate my own understanding of that project." 
 
"For me, history is about giving back to the people of the past  
the imaginative domains they constructed for themselves.  These domains  
included an economic--of "industry" and "trade," "enterprise" and  
"employment," "output" and "efficiency," "wages" and "dividends," and  
"profit" and "loss"--as well as a social, a political, a sexual, and so  
forth.  The selves that discursively fashioned the economic domain and  
were in turn shaped by it may well have donned labels such as  
"businessman," "artisan," "worker," "industrialist," "merchant," and  
"unemployed" that we employ today.  The historian must not assume,  
however, that such terms meant in other times and places what they mean  
to him or her today or that they occupied a comparable place in the  
speech acts of the past.  Rather, it is the burden of the historian to  
read the representations of the economic domains of earlier cultures for  
what they reveal about those cultures, however unfamiliar and complex they  
may turn out to have been." 
 
"Certainly, there is nothing in this that precludes a fruitful  
engagement between historians of subjectivities and economic historians.   
If that engagement has yet to take place, it is as much the fault of the  
historians of the self, who have been egregious in their neglect of the  
economic, as of economic historians inattentive to the subjective.  That  
said, it should be clear that the historical questions Rawski  
identifies--the connection between Germany's economic difficulties in the  
1920s and the rise of National Socialism, for example--are prime sites  
for conversations among economic historians and linguistically-inspired  
cultural historians provided they share an abiding respect for the  
otherness of the past." 
 
Ross Emmett 
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