===================== HES POSTING ===================== 
 
The list has been unusually quiet regarding the most recent 
editorial, so, against my better judgment, I'm going to put 
forth some thoughts.  However, let me preface these 
remarks by saying that the editorial reads more like a 
hypotheses concerning a historical question.  Therefore, 
rather than engage in a discussion on the specific topic of 
the hypotheses, my thoughts focus on Mirowski's style as a 
historian. 
 
I remember first reading "More Heat Than Light" as an 
undergraduate and getting goose bumps.  This was certainly 
not Blaug, and it captured a range of historical experience in 
a thoughtful and provocative way.  Concurrently, I was also 
reading Ginzburg's "The Cheese and the Worms," at the 
time a vanguard piece in social history, and saw a number 
of parallels between the two works.  With Mirowski's 
editorial, I am reminded again of the parallels between 
Mirowski and Ginzburg.  Both are aggressive readers of the 
historical record and look for discrepancies and gaps in 
previous historian's accounts.  In much more eloquent 
words, Dominick LaCapra's description of Ginzburg's work 
could, with some modification, be used to described 
Mirowski's editorial at hand: 
 
'(the text is) reinforced by a structuralist methodology and a 
reliance on a particular literary form: the detective story. 
His narrative is itself strangely anecdotal and geometrical, 
projectively empathetic and reductively analytic, extremely 
fragmented and overly unified in theme and thesis.  The 
object of his quest is obviously a deep structure, and his 
notion of a privileged code, filter, or grid provides a 
convenient reductive device.' 
 
A modification to this description is that I do not view 
Mirowski's work as critical as LaCapra does Ginzburg's. 
In fact, I find his work a good counterbalance to the sterile 
historical accounts we too often find in HET.  Mirowski 
eschews the usual oversimplification of the distorted 
interaction of scientific ideas between disciplines and among 
heterodoxy and orthodoxy.  As a result, we get a much 
more richly textured historical account of economics. 
 
However, one important caveat is that this style can no 
longer hide behind the Rankean defense of telling history 
'as it was.'  The artifice of the author playing no role in the 
telling of history crumbles. 
 
This not necessarily a bad thing as long as the historian does 
not continue to adhere to the rhetoric of Whiggish (or 
Rankean or documentarian...et al) historians, presenting the 
past 'as if' it told it told itself.  The flip-side is for the style 
to devolve into a subjective relativism, useless for anything 
but polemic.  These are some of the same issues that 
contemporary historiography are dealing with, and I think 
it's useful to keep this tension in mind with regard to Roy 
Weintraub's call for better historical standards in HET. 
 
Thanks for indulging me on a late Friday afternoon.  Have a 
great weekend. 
 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]