Since I unwittingly provoked this discussion, I have attentively followed it. In all innocence I had expected a few confident responses to give me some guidance in dealing with anti-historical attitudes among economists here at Harvard. (I should make it clear, I am in the History department.) But now I am more confused than I was in the first place. Many of the responses boil down to indignation, which I share, but which is no good in arguing with very smart (even if misguided) colleagues. Others seem to confirm my own sense that the problem is, historians and other thoughtful social scientists want to understand things as fully as they can, therefore in questions of economic thought past or present study not only explicit statements or arguments or functions or formulae, but also and especially assumptions, premises, unconscious vectors or trajectories in the thought, which means their understanding tends to the specific, dated, and particular (although it may move to syntheses), whereas the anti-historical types want (aside from careerism) simply to transform all questions into equations and solve them, as generally as possible, whatever an equation's use or reliability in dealing with particular or general realities. In short, the errors of past economists might largely lie more in their premises than in their reasoning, so that a history that included the study of their premises could actually explain what they got right and what they got wrong, show why they got it right or wrong, which might well make such study useful for critical analysis of contemporary economics, or economic discussions. Studying the history of economic thought at least tacitly as the history error in economics would (at least) sharpen the critical skills for detecting false or faulty assumptions, essential in any contemporary economic debate. Does this (from someone not an economist but very interested in economics) make any sense? John Womack