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After returning from 2 very long days in the archives of 
Fritz Machlup and Friedrich Hayek at the Hoover Institution, 
it is hard to argue with Roy that much more archival work 
is essential to the health of the history of economic thought 
-- but this is not the same argument given earlier.  My 
claim also goes further -- i.e. that history in all its forms, 
including straight forward archival research, is essential to 
the health of economics as a science as we turn into a new century. 
Consider this picture:  all sorts of doors are shut to a superior 
explanatory strategy in economics based on many simple falsehoods and 
myths, which can be quickly disposed of with just a little work in 
the archives -- or even only with some effort to fill in the historical 
picture using published sources.  I give some examples in my HES paper, 
presented last summer in Vancouver.  I continually find it astonishing how 
little work has been done on Hayek -- and here I can testify from first 
hand knowledge that there is a bounty of original unpublished archival 
material which, as it becomes better known, will shape all future work on 
Hayek.  Even a somewhat casual historical competence regarding Hayek gained 
only from published sources would change many of the narratives of the 
history of 20th-century economics that I find in the literature.  How does 
one read the later essays of Hicks, and the UCLA oral history program 
interviews with Hayek, and come away without a transformed sense of the 
Hicks story -- a sense that is incompatible with the stories of Hicks that 
somehow leave Hayek out of the story (how is this possible?).  Yes, more 
original historical research, and more archival research.  -- But this 
is everyone's responsibility. 
 
Greg Ransom 
Dept. of Philosophy 
UC-Riverside 
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http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm 
 
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