----------------- 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]