Isn't the issue discussed in this thread essentially equivalent to the question of whether or not economics is a discipline progressing in a linear and cumulative way --that is, with new bits of knowledge added to a definitive corpus? If the answer is yes, history of thought would be a redundant pastime adding no useful knowledge to the discipline; if the answer is no, then there is a scope for HoT, for the simple fact that there is no way now to know whether we ('we' whom?) are (now) on the right track or not. Unless we take the history of economics to coincide with the history of analytical instruments and theorems (by the way, did anyone notice that the best article prize given by eshet is called "history of economic analysis"?), which one could maintain that do improve and cumulate, one could easily argue that the history of economic (or any other discipline, for that matters: mathematics included) is far from linear, but is characterized by unexpected return of old issues and viewpoints (this sentence, cited by memory from an Italian translation (!!), was used by the Nobel prize Ilya Prigogine in association with the historian of science Isabelle Stengers to describe the history of physics). Daniele Besomi