Ivan Moscati raises an important point but we, as an academic community, need to be very careful about how we raise it. HET is a small and, as we've seen, vulnerable field. It seems to me that the survival and regeneration of such a field depends on making strategic alliances -- all sorts of alliances. Many of us find our intellectual homes (and research grant funding) in departments of economics. Many of us find refuge in science studies programs. Others are in philosophy or humanities departments. I may have one of the oddest affiliations in a medical school. But we all share a belief that the history of economics is important enough to preserve and, presumably, we all share our historical insights with the colleagues we find around us. It's not surprising to me that the result is a variety of approaches. My point is, we come in many flavours and we do work of different kinds. It seems to me that we don't want to portray our "future" as an "either-or" proposition, but rather a "both-and" alternative. The more different approaches to the HET that we can encourage, the greater our potential audiences and the more lucrative our sources of research funding. None of that means that we ought to be happy about a bureau of statistics deciding how we should be categorized among academic disciplines, notwithstanding their need to generate categories of optimal size. Evelyn L. Forget