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On Mon, 11 Nov 1996 "James P. Henderson" wrote 
 
> WHIG HISTORY OF ECONOMICS IS DEAD 
>       Now What? 
> 
       (stuff omitted) 
>                                  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. 
 
     (more stuff omitted) 
 
The claim that "economics is fundamentally social" seems to be 
important to Henderson's argument and to his rejection of "internal 
history", but it is far from clear what it really means. Economics 
deals with a social process, the production and distribution of wealth 
(Turgot), say. That doesn't make the subject itself social. (Astronomy 
isn't astronomical.) Economists write for an audience, and look at what 
their predecessors and contemporaries have to say, certainly, but 
doesn't that point to the importance of the internal history of the 
subject, not the opposite? 
 
The evolution of language is social, in a way that the evolution of 
economics (or physics) is not. Changes in usage, pronunciation, and so 
on are the result of multifarious individual choices by people who have 
no conscious intention of changing the language as a whole. Economics, 
by contrast, evolves through the work of individuals who are 
consciously striving to learn from and improve on their predecessors. 
Internal history must be important. 
 
The importance of "context" is similarly slippery. Of course context 
matters, up to a point. Classical economists, for example, assumed 
(near) subsistence wages because wages were near to subsistence. But 
again one must be careful. Hume, Quesnay, Steuart, Turgot and Smith 
were all writing at the same time, in the same context, but their 
theories were very different. (France v. Scotland doesn't work as an 
explanatory variable - Smith and Turgot were closer in their theories 
than either was to his compatriots.) I can't see that sociologizing is 
going to help either. The similarities and contrasts between them are 
in the texts, not the context. 
 
It was Smith's theories that dominated in the following decades. Why? 
Context and sociology may help, but might it not be that Smith's 
theories offered more convincing explanations of a wider range of 
observable phenomena than any of the others? Context, of course, to 
explain which problems were important and which explanations were seen 
as convincing, but close attention to the logic of the arguments too. 
Archives, biography, etc. may tell us something about the aims and 
methods used by each writer, but they can't tell us what it is that 
makes the Wealth of Nations stand out above other work of the time, or 
why it is still worth reading now. 
 
Another very brief example. A major part of Ricardo's motivation was to 
resolve what he saw as weaknesses and ambiguities in Smith. Without 
internal history, we literally couldn't make sense of his enterprise at 
all. 
 
So don't give up reading the texts and thinking hard about what they 
are trying to say. 
 
---------------------- 
 
Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) 
University of Bristol, Department of Economics 
8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, England 
Phone (+44/0)117 928 8428 
Fax (+44/0)117 928 8577 
 
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