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I would like to offer a belated thank you to Ross Emmett for his 
effort to define Whig history, external, and internal for the people 
in our discussion group. This was a time consuming task, and one 
that I certainly wasn't up to at this point in the semester. 
 
I especially want to applaud his effort to minimize the absolute 
importance of internal and external to doing good, thick history. When 
I used these terms in my recent book on Keynes, I ultimately 
found it necessary to say that the terms are suggestive in pointing 
to "something" that moves the discussion along, but that like all 
theory they are limiting and so have limits. Tony Brewer is quite 
right to say that the sense of what is external and internal may 
change in context. 
 
I think that Tony Brewer is wrong, however, to say that Sam Hollander 
is the only neoclassical historian of thought of prominence. People like 
George Stigler and Paul Samuelson have published a steady stream of articles 
in top journals during the last 25 years that have shaped the sense 
of what is acceptable history of thought in the mainstream. Even 
more than these two has been Don Patinkin. I would say that in different 
degrees these are the prominent Whig, neo-classical  historians of economic 
thought. 
 
I also think that an enormous amount of Whig history of thought has been 
published that falls under Ross's point b: by people who are on the 
"losing end" of the theeoretical debate in the last three decades 
and who have gravitated to the "history of thought" as a place where 
they can try to back up and show where and when their side should have 
won. One finds this kind of "history" done by virtually every heterodox 
school of thought; "histories" of this sort are published in the journals 
of the dissenting groups and in mainstream journals by the leading lights 
of these groups. But while I have  sympathy with some of these 
schools, I find the "history" they do to be poor history at best. 
It is this kind of work that I think can be appropriately termed 
both Whiggish and internal; it argues from narrow point of view 
(whose equations are right) and focuses on the equations and their 
derivation to the virtual exclusion of everything else. People can't be 
stopped from doing this kind of work, but I wish they wouldn't call 
it history. It certainly rarely qualifies. 
 
Brad Bateman 
Grinnell College 
 
 
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