----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 
 
Spengler, Joseph J. 1940. Sociological Presuppositions in  
Economic Theory. SOUTHERN ECONOMIC JOURNAL 7: 131-57. 
 
In the category of articles, I nominate Joseph J. Spengler's  
"Sociological Presuppositions in Economic Theory." In this  
publication Spengler advanced his distinctive approach to the  
History of Economics.  I nominate it not as a triumph in the  
interpretation of the work of some economist or school of  
economists, but for its influence on the nature of the History of  
Economic Thought as a discipline.   
 
Until the 1930s, the history of economic thought was largely a  
matter of polemics.  Most of it was historical argument for one or  
another school of theory.  The Neoclassical practitioners tended to  
write books on the "scope and method" of the subject, but the  
content of such works was a spin on the history of the subject.   
The Historical economists wrote histories of the subject, focusing  
on external factors [changing industrial conditions and changing  
climates of opinion], but they, too, put a spin on history in the hope  
of building the subject into a new, empirically based theory.  These  
early histories of economics were internalist in the sense that they  
focused on the internal postulates, logic, and contradictions of the  
subject, even when calling on external factors as explanatory  
variables.   
 
Out of the discussion of the nature of Economics in the 1930s, and  
influenced by the sociologists, Sorokin, Malinkowski, and Talcott  
Parsons, J.J. Spengler broke away from the polemics that had  
biased earlier histories of economic thought.  He considered the  
influence of economic, political, social, and intellectual factors [the  
general climate of opinion, the information environment] on the  
progress of Economics in all its "schools", and as a profession.   
He concentrated on external, rather than internal, factors in the  
advance of the subject, allowing that much was to be explained by  
irrational factors unrelated to its logical structure and empirical  
investigations.   
 
The importance of this break is evident in the subsequent quasi  
divorce of the History of Economic Thought from Economics in  
general, that is, from economic theory.  The advance of Economics  
and the histories of economic thought directly associated with that  
advance have been internalist, and have continued the tradition of  
inter-school polemics that marked the History of Economic  
Thought before the nineteen thirties. Spengler's approach gave the  
History of Economic Thought a different foundation, further from  
Economics and closer to Intellectual History.  It gave the History of  
Economic thought an independence for which it paid by being  
excluded from most post graduate programs in Economics.  It  
gained from its independence the stimulus of those elements in the  
information environment of the late twentieth century that generated  
a number of new departures in Intellectual History.   
 
The continuing importance of Duke University in the History of  
Economic Thought is a strong testimony to the importance of  
Spengler's influence on the advance of the subject; and there  
remain clearly evident traces of his externalist approach in current  
work in the subject. Unfortunately the distinctive polemics that  
marked Spengler's written contributions after 1940 became less  
frequent in the History of Economic Thought after the late published  
essays of Harry Johnson (See, for example, ON ECONOMICS  
AND SOCIETY, 1975).  It is my conjecture, however, that such  
polemics, or something similar, survived in the work of T.W.  
Hutchison, who also emerged, though in a different way, from the  
information environment of the 1930s.   
 
Robin Neill 
 
------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]