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Roy Weintraub wrote 
 
> Brewer's "enjoyment" of Beethoven's music is more 
> complex, and socially connected, than he appears to understand. That 
> the BBC plays Beethoven more than Ravi Shankar is not unconnected to 
> his familiarity with, and pleasure in, the music. That Brewer knows 
> how embedded Beethoven is within the standard British performance 
> canon is knowledge he was not born with, nor is his knowledge of 
> harmonic structure independent of his not having grown up on a 
> Hopi reservation. Brewer's understanding of Beethoven's music is 
> fully contextual, and the contingencies of his personal and social 
> history cannot be "abstracted out" to locate his _real_  or _deep_ 
> understanding. 
 
OF COURSE my appreciation of Beethoven is affected by social factors - 
familiarity with certain kinds of music and not others, etc. I didn't 
deny that for a moment. It also depends on physical and neurological 
factors - the capacity of the ear to hear and of the brain to interpret 
what the ear hears. Plus lots of other things. 
 
My point is that we could dicuss the social history of music, which Roy 
wants to stress, without knowing anything about the physics, and 
vice-versa. We can study the internal history - how Beethoven extended 
Haydn's harmonic and structural language without knowing about either 
the physics or the social history. ALL OF THESE ARE PERFECTLY SENSIBLE 
THINGS TO DO. We may get further insights by intercutting across them, 
but it may sometimes pay to narrow the focus further. 
 
The same goes for the history of economics. Internal history is a 
perfectly sensible pursuit. So is analysis of the socio/political 
context. I stress again that I have nothing against studies that 
emphasize the social context. Sometimes we want to link the history of 
economics to the history of (say) philosophy, sometimes to the history 
of mathematics, or physics. Sometimes we focus on a very narrow range 
of questions, sometimes we zoom out to a wider view. 
 
My objection is to an attempt to privilege certain approaches over 
others. Weintraub's claim was that because economics is an human 
activity we must study the social background. One could equally say 
that because it is a human activity, we must study human physiology. 
(In view of the ease with which things are misunderstood, let me say 
immediately that I am NOT suggesting that historians of economics 
should focus exclusively on human physiology, though it is, I suppose, 
always possible that someone might find something interesting to say 
about it. I wouldn't rule it out on principle.) 
 
---------------------- 
 
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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