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WHIG HISTORY OF ECONOMICS IS DEAD 
        Now What? 
 
        James P. Henderson 
        Valparaiso University 
 
Let me pick up a thread that runs through the two previous 
editorials, those by Roy Weintraub and Phil Mirowski: 
 
WHIG HISTORY OF ECONOMICS IS DEAD. 
R.I.P. 
Now what? 
 
     Much of the work done in the history of economics during the 
second half of the twentieth century fits the description offered 
by Andrew Pickering in his "Distinguished Guest Lecture," at the 
1995 meeting of the H.E.S. The history of economics "is the genre 
known as history of ideas. In its canonical form this tries to 
understand scientific ideas as evolving under their own inner 
logic. . ." (Pickering, forthcoming).  The history of economics 
has tended towards internal history, concentrating on the 
economics ideas and relegating the life and times of the 
economist and the contemporary institutions to the background. 
Yet economics is fundamentally social, so the social construction 
of economic knowledge must be a central concern.  Paraphrasing 
Wade Hands - economics is practiced in a social context, the 
products of economic activity are the results of a social 
process, and economic knowledge is socially constructed (Hands, 
p. 75).  Moreover, there is a tendency is to ignore "time" while 
constructing the history of economics.  By ignoring time, I mean 
we see the ideas of economists in their final form instead of 
trying to understand how those ideas were developed over time. 
     Admitting that "Whig history of economics is dead," and 
recognizing that "economic knowledge is socially constructed," 
frees us to try other approaches.  We might turn our attention to 
developments in other disciplines where "much mileage has 
recently been got by sociologising and contextualising the 
picture" (Pickering, forthcoming).  Here is how these two 
approaches are described: 
 
     The sociology of scientific knowledge approach has sought to 
     display the social interests that sustain the particular 
     bodies of knowledge that one finds associated with 
     particular groups; and, less theoretically, the 
     historiographic avant garde would probably agree that the 
     best history of ideas is contextualist, relating specific 
     ideas to their historical, cultural, social, etc, contexts 
     (*Ibid*.). 
 
Both of these approaches emphasize the view that economics is a 
knowledge-producing enterprise. This shifts the focus to the 
process of constructing the economic knowledge--the economists 
and their interests and concerns and objectives, the institutions 
where the knowledge was constructed, how the knowledge so 
constructed emerged over time. 
     The demise of the Whig view of history makes our 
intellectual lives as historians of economics much more 
complicated.  According to the historian of science, David 
Knight, in his article "Background and Foreground: Getting Things 
in Context," this approach requires "hard work among the archives 
of some institution or scientist, eminent or obscure . . . [and 
rejects the] wide-angle lenses in favour of close-ups."  For 
Knight it is "a real journey from one world to another; the 
eagle's to the mole's" (Knight, p. 7).  To focus on context 
requires that we find out what concerned intellectuals at a given 
time, how were they educated, what was their intellectual life 
like and how did they interact with society. 
     Having read the masterworks of the economist, what now?  One 
can start by exploring what Bernard Cohen calls "information 
networks."  Economists operate in a scientific community, a group 
of like-minded economists or others simply interested in 
economics.  Cohen's description of the Scientific Revolution 
which "produced a new kind of knowledge and a new method of 
obtaining it, [and] produced new institutions for the 
advancement, recording and dissemination" of that knowledge, 
applies equally to the creation of economics (Cohen, 1985, p. 
81).  Such information networks are both formal and informal. 
Informal information networks include correspondence and face-to- 
face visits, but a "formal information network" requires 
specialist journals and reports, which are customarily sponsored 
by learned societies and academies. 
     In British economics, the *Economic Journal* and the British 
Economics Association (later Royal Economics Society) were the 
realization of such cultural practices and institutions.  But 
prior to 1890 when they were founded, economists had four other 
national learned societies which welcomed them and their ideas: 
the Political Economy Club of London (organized in April, 1821), 
Section F (the Statistical and Economics Section) of the British 
Association for the Advancement of Science (admitted at the third 
meeting in 1833), the London (later Royal) Statistical Society 
(founded by the organizers of Section F, it held its first public 
meeting in March, 1834), and the National Association for the 
Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science 
Association (organized in the summer of 1857 by Lord Brougham, it 
held its first Congress in October of that year).  In addition to 
these national organizations, economists could present their 
ideas at local learned societies, for example, Jevons's papers at 
the Manchester Statistical Society.  There is a wealth of 
material in the Reports, Transactions, and Journals of such 
organizations that remains largely unexploited by historians of 
economics. 
     That economic masterwork that we know and love, is the 
result of a process of investigation and discovery that occurred 
over time.  What was the writer's original objective?  Why did 
the writer select that issue?  Why did she take that particular 
issue so seriously?  That economist was not locked away in a 
garret, completely isolated from social, economic, and 
intellectual events.  Correspondence, early manuscripts, papers 
presented at learned societies are a rich source of material 
revealing how the economist's ideas developed over time.  Those 
ideas were tried out on others, presented in a setting where the 
economist believed that her ideas were welcome and were they 
would get a fair hearing and where the criticism would be 
constructive.  These change the course of the development of 
those ideas. 
     What intellectual tools were available to him?  It is 
important to remember that mathematics too has a history.  So 
does scientific methodology and philosophy and statistics, both 
the gathering of data and its interpretation.  How did he use the 
analytical tools available to him?  If the available analytical 
tools were inadequate or inappropriate, how did he respond?  Did 
he create new tools?  Adapt tools from other disciplines? 
     One of most enlightening exercises one can undertake when 
trying to capture the essence of the context that engaged an 
economist is to read the contemporary reviews of the new 
masterpiece.  We know it to be a masterpiece, but did the 
author's contemporaries?  Do not limit yourself to reviews in 
specialist economics journals, for some of the most interesting 
reactions appear in the popular journals of the day, *The 
Quarterly Review*, *The Westminster Review*, *The Edinburgh 
Review*, come to mind in the British case.  Also look in the 
journals of other disciplines.  There are fascinating treatments 
of Alfred Marshall's *Principles* in *International Journal of 
Ethics*, *Mind*, and the *Economic Review*. 
     A contextual approach requires that we recognize that 
economic knowledge is created in real time.  Pickering focuses on 
scientific culture, which he extends beyond the simple notion of 
a field of knowledge, to include "culture" in the broader sense 
of the "made things" of science--"skills and social relations, 
machines and instruments, as well as scientific facts and 
theories" (Pickering, 1995, p. 3).  To that list, we add the 
information network created for the advancement, recording and 
dissemination of economic knowledge.  Here's where things get 
complicated, for context is not constant.  Pickering offers us an 
intriguing approach, one that Esther-Mirjam Sent employed so 
successfully that she was awarded the "Joseph Dorfman Prize for 
the Best Dissertation" by the H.E.S. in 1995.  Pickering explores 
"the mangle of practice"--the process of modeling as it develops 
over time.  Modeling is an open-ended process.  "A given model 
can be extended in an indefinite number of ways; nothing within 
the model foreshadows which should be chosen."  To comprehend the 
practice of economics necessitates "understanding closure, . . . 
understanding why some individual or group extends particular 
models in particular ways."  The key to understanding closure 
 
     appears to lie in the observation that models are not 
     extended in isolation.  Modeling typically aims at producing 
     associations in which a plurality of projected elements hang 
     together in some way.  And the important point here is that 
     the achievement of such associations is not guaranteed in 
     advance--particular modeling sequences readily lead to 
     mismatches in which the associations are not achieved. 
 
The modeling sequence is an interactive process of "Resistance" 
and "Accommodation."  The development of the model gives rise to 
resistances which impede the achievement of goals. 
 
     Encounters with resistance set in train a process of 
     accommodation, in which the openness of modeling is further 
     exploited in trial-and-error revisions and substitutions of 
     models, modeling sequences, and so on, aimed at proceeding 
     further toward the intended association.  The process of 
     accommodation itself precipitates further resistances in and 
     to practice, so that practice in the end appears as a goal- 
     oriented dialectic of resistance and accommodation. 
 
Successful accommodations overcome resistances in a series of 
"Free Moves" and "Forced Moves."  The free moves in the modeling 
process are those active components of scientific practice where 
the scientist confronts a resistance free to exercise choice and 
discretion.  The forced moves, the passive components of 
practice, intertwine with the free ones and serve to elaborate 
the scientist's choices in ways that are beyond her control. 
Faced with resistances as consequences of the forced moves, she 
is led to revise some of her free moves.  Given the absence of 
universal scientific standards, these free and forced moves can 
be traced over time in an attempt to understand the alternatives 
available to her, the choices she made, and the consequences of 
those decisions (Pickering and Stephanides, 1992, pp. 140--141 
and Pickering 1995, chapter 1). 
     These two related approaches--"sociologising and 
contextualising"--if adopted to the writing the history of 
economic offer promising possibilities for our discipline.  But 
first, we must take these approaches seriously and abandon Whig 
history. 
 
REFERENCES 
 
Cohen, I. Bernard. 1985. *Revolution in Science*. 
Hands, D. Wade. 1994. "The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: 
     Some thoughts on the possibilities," *New Directions in 
     Economic Methodology*, Roger E. Backhouse, ed. 
Knight, David. "Background and Foreground: Getting Things in 
     Context," *British Journal of the History of Science* 20 
     (1987), 3 -- 12. 
Pickering, Andrew and Adam Stephanides. 1992. "Constructing 
     Quarternions: On the Analysis of Conceptual Practice," 
     *Science as Practice and Culture*. Andrew Pickering, ed. 
     139--167. 
Pickering, Andrew. forthcoming.  "The History of Economics and 
     the History of Agency," *The State of the History of 
     Economics: Proceedings of the History of Economics Society* 
_____. 1995. *The Mangle of Practice, Time, Agency & Science*. 
 
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