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Ross Emmett wrote: 
 
> 1. _Geistesgeschichten_ are a necessary part of the re-formulation of 
> traditions (interpretative communities, if you will) in almost every 
> generation. By re-casting the tradition's fundamental questions, they 
> prevent "normal discourse" (similar to Kuhn's "normal science") from 
> becoming stale and assist newcomers in placing themselves in the 
> tradition's conversation. Many historians of economic thought aspire to 
> writing _geistesgeschichten_, and as such are simply participating in the 
> re-casting of the fundamental questions of the scientific community of 
> economists. None of my comments about the history of economics have been 
> aimed at denying the relevance of this work. I have simply tried to 
> distinguish this work from historical work on economics. 
 
Finally, perhaps, with Ross's and Peter Boettke's posts, 
this thread is moving off the "Yes, it is", "No, it's not" play. 
 
With respect to contributions to history, our historian friends have 
a useful phrase: poor contributions are either under-researched or 
over-interpreted. Certainly these are "relative" values, but doctoral 
theses of the kind mostly done by young historians of economics are, in 
historians' language, under-researched. Providing a new interpretation 
of, say, Keynes's employment function, based on primary and secondary 
sources, is an exercise in interpretation. It would hardly ever pass 
muster as a history thesis. What new research, it would be asked, 
supported the new interpretation? What new archival find, what new 
evidence from contemporaneous work, what new "contextualization" 
which based the interpretation on alternative primary and secondary 
sources, supported the new interpretation? If none, the student would 
be asked to go back and "do" some research. 
 
Like Ross, I am not opposed to geistesgeschichten; a fine example is 
Axel Leijonhufvud's _On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of 
Keynes_. But this is not historical work, in the sense of new research and 
interpretation based on that new research. It is interpretation only. 
My call, and perhaps Ross's in some measure, and perhaps for Brad 
Bateman as well, is for the balance between research and 
interpretation to shift in our subdiscipline. Without committing 
those individuals to this view, I assert that we need more 
research, and thus relatively less interpretation per unit of research. 
 
I recall that Judy Klein suggested, in this thread, that it was 
difficult to find dissertations in HES for our prize which were both 
well-researched and well-interpreted. This is my experience too as an 
associate editor of HOPE. Most of my noise on this thread is in support 
of a revised HES understanding that writing in history of economics should 
(value judgment, call for action) instantiate the historians' values 
of research and interpretation, appropriately combined. 
 
E. Roy Weintraub 
Duke University 
 
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