Perhaps one significant reason why few historians of economics have studied its contemporary forms is the difficulty of the task. If one wants to call oneself a historian of economics, one can do so more easily by studying pre-WWII economics. As history is about the past, the study of long-dead economists can more readily be identified with history than that of living economists. But historians would not be duped. History is not just about the past: it is about its construction. And this explains much of the inattention to contemporary economics. Whereas historians of long-dead economists can take advantage of the confusion between the chronological past and the constructed past, historians of recent economics cannot: they need to build this past that some still consider their present. If one studies contemporary economics and claims it to be history, one needs to show that one is constructing a past in a way that marks it out as history not as a contribution to contemporary economics - that it is not, for example, a survey article. Perhaps Roy Weintraub's question can be reformulated in a slightly different way: Is it so surprising that people who call themselves historians of economics but were not trained as historians show little interest in recent economics when historians themselves can have trouble placing the writing historically about the present time? A few years ago, the Ecole normale sup?rieure de Cachan hosted an Institut d'histoire du temps pr?sent. There most historians were studying WWII. Even they were not studying more recent history than that. Philippe Fontaine