----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Roy Weintraub's response to Gunning and Lee does not face the consequences of his own important work. If there is "no position apart from the doing of economics which can inform the consideration of the doing of economics," then the same should hold true of 'the doing of studies of the past.' Or anything else for that matter. All studies of anything are, in an important way, "presentist" (the more important of Roy's criteria of Whiggism), because they are informed by the present position of the author of the study. This understanding has often been used to unmask the ideological purposes of studies purporting to be objective -- whether the studies are about the way the economy works, or about the way thought about the way the economy works has developed though time. Having done the unmasking, one can (a) offer an alternative record of the past that is frank about (or at least implicitly conscious of) the way one's own ideological premises and purposes color the record; or one might instead (b) offer an alternative record that tries to free itself of the ideological muddle altogether, ridding itself of the present context and setting itself instead in the "historical context". Roy likes (b), and for good reason: first, one might learn something new in the writing or reading of such a record; second (though I am not as sure that he agrees with this), airing openly one's ideological commitments and metaphysical preconceptions often makes for impolite conversation. His next step, though, is ironic: in order to promote (b) he wants to call it "history" and demarcate it from nonhistory, much as logical positivists wanted to demarcate science from nonscience, notwithstanding his belonging to an intellectual legacy that is skeptical of the latter attempt. So he quotes with approval Latour's claim that a self-contained self-referential history of science "does not count as history at all. At best it is court historiography ..." (One heard a lot of this at the April HOPE conference on "The Future of the History of Economics". At least three times someone said in discussion, "but that's not history ...," revealing a demarcation criterion that the speaker thought he met but others did not. The disagreement about what we mean by "history" is widespread.) The trouble is that if you took Roy seriously from the beginning, you're already persuaded of the omnipresentness of presentism. Which means that every study of the past is to a degree "court historiography" -- the court's presence living in the premises and preconceptions of the historian. Which means that history, as Roy has demarcated it, is an empty category. So why even have it around? It would seem that the thing to do would be to define history broadly enough so that it includes even what the quotation of Latour excludes, and then to talk about "kinds of history that I don't like" instead of nonhistory. And sometimes Roy does seem to do this -- and at other times he does not. In any case I don't think he considers the pernicious use that can be -- is not necessarily, but can be -- made of the empty category. Namely, after history is demarcated from nonhistory, terms like "historical reconstruction" and "historical context" can be used as badges while forgetting about the reason and criterion of demarcation, and so forgetting that the category must really be empty. It is necessary to forget, because to remember would be to realize that one's history can't meet the standard of "history" as it has been demarcated; to remember would be to deny one's own objectivity and admit the validity of some criticisms of prejudice. And that, the author fears, would be rhetorically fatal. The other day I was reading Barbara Fried's _The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement_ (Harvard, 1998). She writes, "This book is primarily a work of intellectual history -- an attempt to excavate and restore in its historical context an elaborate and (in its time) seditious argument about the nature of law and legal rights" (p.28). To me the book represents an impressive work of research into past thought -- as well as a transparent work of advocacy for more state involvement in the constitution, regulation, and taxation of markets than Hale's foes (or current political consensus?) would accept. What kind of work does the term "historical context" do for her? Pat Gunning got it pretty right. Steve Meardon ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]