----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- In reply to Professor Weintraub Because I do most of my research and teaching on 20th century material, I have generally not been asked to teach history of economic thought courses. It seems that most people exclude the 20th century as a part of the history of economics and the history of economic thought. To get around this, I teach my courses historically. For example, when I teach graduate neoclassical microeconomics, I have the students start with Marshall's Principles and then show the students how demand theory or production/cost theory, etc. developed in the 20th century. In another course that I get to teach once every blue moon on Post Keynesian price and production models, I start with the surplus models of Ricardo and then proceed with the Austrian models and end up with Leontief and Sraffa--that is the students get a historical understanding of how these types of models developed. Teaching courses historically is a way to get around the reluctance of colleagues to accept a history of economics in the 20th century course. But this also means that 20th century canonical texts depends on the history I am teaching: it could be Marshall, Robinson, Chamberlin, Pigou, and Bain in one case; and Leontief, Sraffa, Burchardt, Nurske, Steedman, Gaitskell, and Kurz and Salvadori in another case. The question I have is why are our colleagues so reluctant to accept the teaching of such a course. My gut feeling is that it has to do with the dominance of, broadly speaking, neoclassical economics and the religious adherence to it by most economists. Teaching history means that you give students access to a long memory and one that contains features/aspects that suggest that neoclassical economics has been challenged and that there are very different ways of thinking about economic theory. Of course one could teach a sort of whiggish history of economic thought for the 20th century--and this would not be very different in style from the sort of whiggish pre-20th century history of thought generally taught (who would ever think of teaching Georgism or the German/English historical school or anarchism-Christain socialism in a history of economic thought course). But such a whiggish course which delineates the natural unfolding and flowering of neoclassical economics would simply reflect to dominance of neoclassical economics and beliefs of its adherents and not be a real history course. Fred Lee ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]