----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- In a recent book review on EH Net [http://www.eh.net/lists/archives/hes/dec-2003/0040.php] Esther-Mirjam Sent referred to the discussion about thin and thick histories that Roy Weintraub, I, and others recently participated in. In it she relates thin history to "conventional exegesis" and also equates a thin history approach to a rational reconstruction approach. She then relates that approach to a Whiggish perspective in which "the theory from one school could be extracted, without much violence, from the author's body of thought, its underpinning vision, and its environmental context." She then continues: "What Nicola Giocoli offers ... is thin history, or rational reconstruction. Ignoring historical contingencies, personal vicissitudes, academic relations, funding availability, and so on, he focuses almost exclusively on written texts." I'm not sure what "rational reconstruction" is but I am sure that what she is calling thin history is not what I meant by thin history. I have long been an advocate of using as broad a set of information sources as possible. (See my "Form and Content in the History of Economic Thought" reprinting in my Why Aren't Economists as Important as Garbagemen book, in which I specifically argued that historians of recent economic thought needed to use interviews and surveys rather than just exegesis, and needed to talk about academic relations, funding, and the larger context. I was using those alternative approaches back in the early 1980s when it was seen as a radical departure from what was previously done. (When Arjo Klamer and I interviewed graduate students in the 1980s for "The Making of An Economist" we were accused of being sociologists. This past year, as I have updated it, I heard no such accusations.) Thin histories, to me, are simply histories written by economists who want to remain economists, and not become historians, philosophers, or something else. I'd love to do thick histories, but I can't and still keep up with what's happening in economics. So I do thin histories. In those histories I try to add vision that I think is often lacking in many thick economists' work, but I see myself working with them, not against them. I am just an economist who is focusing on issues somewhat different from the ones they are focusing on. Consistent with that approach I bounce my ideas off my economist friends, and modify my ideas as I discuss their work, and my interpretation of their work, with them. It is collaborative work. For example, I'm currently organizing a conference here at Middlebury on the future of macro. We have top macro researchers using new techniques discussing their approach and how it might change the way macro is done. It is my belief that an economist can bring a deeper sense of economists and economics to a study of economics than can a non-economist, and thus there is some advantage to having an economist do a thin history, even if he or she doesn't have all the tools of a historian or a sociologist. An academic economist has a feel for the way the academic system works, and, if he or she can capture that, he or she can convey the vision of an economist much better than can someone doing a thick history who is not trained in economics. Clearly, it would be better to be trained in everything, but that's generally not possible. My point is that "good" history of thought-whether thick or thin--uses whatever tools available and really tries to get into the vision of the author. Esther-Mirjam's characterization of thin history misses that sense, and seems to equate thin history with narrow-minded and unimaginative history. Such history is just bad history; it's not thin of thick history. An example of where I believe a thick history can go wrong is a book I recently read by S. M Amadae entitled Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. The author is in History of Science and Technology Program and is using in what I believe would be described at a "thick history' approach. He does all the usual things thick historians seem to like-he relates a number of different approaches-economics, public and social choice theory, and political science and finds a Rand connection-something that seems to be de rigueur for Science and Technology histories. The problem for me with the book is that it doesn't get the story right because it doesn't really capture my sense of the academic economist's approach. The author sees the development of rational choice as a deliberately chosen tool-chosen by what he calls scholar warriors-to fight socialism and defend capitalist democracy. That doesn't fit my view of the people that the book describes. Instead, my description of the academic economists has generally been of individuals looking for ways to advance in their careers-choosing research strategies that offered them opportunities for advancement, and interesting problems to solve with the tools that they have. They went to RAND because it provided money and interesting colleagues; their association with RAND is not an indicator of a conspiracy or a war connection. While some of the researchers the author discusses may have favored democratic capitalism as an ideology, the ones I know were not especially ideologically committed, but instead were willing to follow the analysis wherever it might lead. Rational choice doesn't provide support of democratic capitalism, and I doubt whether most of the scholars he discussed would say it does. Scholars gravitated to RAND because that was where the money and interesting people were, not because scholars at RAND or the scholars had some grand design to construct a research program to defend democratic capitalism. My point is that there are advantages of both thick and thin histories, but I do not see thin histories as synonymous with "rational reconstruction" or with any specific approach. A thin history is simply a history written by an economist who wants to remain an economist, and, tempting as it might be to become something else, avoids the temptation and remains an economist. Dave Colander ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]