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Tony Brewer writes to ask if it is really true that the history 
of thought in the last few decades has been largely Whiggish 
and internalist. I accept this as a fact, but others may not. 
I would take Judy Klein's posting about judging the HES essay 
contest to be some sort of confirmation that most contemporary 
work is Whiggish and internalist. I hope that others will weigh 
in with their own perceptions of the contemporary literature. 
 
My own experience is formed largely by reading a mountain of 
papers on Keynes in the last 15 years. One rarely reads a paper 
in this literature that is a good piece of history. The standard 
format in the genre is to identify some aspect of Keynes thought, 
explain why this is just like some aspect of contemporary thought, 
and to (implicitly or explicitly) argue by authority that Keynes's 
brilliance in seeing this point bolsters the position of our 
contemporaries who share this position. This is what I think 
of as "high" Whig history. That is, what is important about Keynes 
is what he has to say about contemporary debates on economic theory. 
Some of the people who do this with Keynes's work are neo-classicists. 
Some are Post-Keynesians. Some are Austrians. Some are rational 
expectationists. But I think you can see the picture. The style of argument 
is concerned with contemporary debates and uses the past pretty exclusively 
to adjudicate contemporary debates. 
 
Thus, when I started to write about Keynes, I wanted to read documents 
and discover what could be said beyond these ahistorical exercises 
in claiming the corpse. I wasn't interested in writing a history 
in this genre. 
 
I won't go any further in describing my own effort to write fuller, 
richer history since I've published an article in HOPE  about my 
experience ("In the Realm of Concept and Circumstance", Spring 1994) 
except to make this one additional comment. What I have ended up trying 
to do (or just ended up doing) in my own work is to understand the 
theoretical structures as the were constructed. What ideas and experiences 
in Keynes's life led to the particular pages I'm trying to interpret. 
This involves looking at things like his early philosophical work and 
his later work in policy making, advising, and investing. I found 
that many of the misinterpretations I found in the "high" Whig literature 
could be de-bunked in this fashion. 
 
My own experience, which has kept me pretty firmly rooted in the 
equations and theories, as equations and theories, leads me to see much 
of what I read in the discussion surrounding Roy's and Jim's editorials 
as a fear of the unknown. Yes, people could write purely externalist 
histories that focus on the sociology of Adam Smith to the exclusion of 
his theories or about women's fashion trends at mid-century and their 
relationship to  neo-classical theorizing. But that's not what those of us 
who advocate more attention to external factors are trying to do and most 
historians of economic thoguht would have no time for it if was what got 
published. I wish people could get past their reactionary fears and 
think about the real advances that can be made by trying to write 
better history. If you want to see what can done in this regard 
try reading Peter Clarke's "The Keynesian Revolution in the Making" 
or Ewen Green's "The Crisis of Conservatism". Both books show how 
economic ideas are shaped by policy needs and how ideas get changed 
and transformed in the process of their use. Great stuff! What a change 
to think about where ideas came from and how they're used. There's a whole 
world out there waiting for you, if you would just let yourself enjoy it 
and learn from it. 
 
But please, let's return now to Tony Brewer's question. Is anyone out there 
willing to argue that the discipline has not tended strongly toward 
Whiggish and internalist histories in the last few decades? 
 
Brad Bateman 
Grinnell College 
 
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