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Roy Weintraub wrote 
 
> I assert that we need more research, and thus relatively less 
> interpretation per unit of research. 
 
This seems to present us with a definition - historical research (in 
the intellectual history of economics) = archives = new information. 
The study and interpretation of known, published, texts clearly doesn't 
count as research on this definition. Geistesgeschichten are offered as 
an alternative, but these seem be to confined to broad overviews, 
're-casting the tradition's fundamental questions' (Ross Emmett), and 
are 'not historical work, in the sense of new research' (Weintraub). 
 
But the history of economics has to be, primarily, a history of 
published texts from (say) Mun and Petty onwards, since published work 
is overwhelmingly the main form in which economic ideas have been 
formulated and communicated. Do we really know and understand these 
texts so well that there is nothing to be gained by further study of 
them? Roy's example is (characteristically) well chosen - 'providing a 
new interpretation of, say, Keynes's employment function'. I am 
inclined to agree that Keynes, like Marx and a few others, is 
over-researched and over-interpreted, but almost all the rest of the 
corpus of published work in economics (even, bar a few chapters, the 
Wealth of Nations) seems to me to be under-studied and 
under-interpreted. 
 
The relevant context for any given work is mainly provided by other 
published works (those of predecessors and contemporaries). The impact 
of any given individual on others was generally by the same route. Roy's 
generalized comparison with history is inappropriate, since the history 
of (say) warfare or politics is not a history of printed texts in the 
way that intellectual history is. 
 
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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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