Where is the editor of SHOE list?
?
We get almost daily rants parading as historical scholarship in this thread on Hayek, and people want to know why the subdiscipline of history of economic thought is in trouble.

This list-serve is one of the main vehicles for the exchange of information about new ideas in our field and new opportunities for mutually beneficial intellectual exchange.

Yet we are subjected to "intellectual pollution" instead.

If we have learned anything from the work of the great Lin Ostrom on the managing of the "commons" it is this, we should expect such "intellectual pollution" unless the rules are set up such that (a) limit access, (b) assign responsibility, and (c) introduce graduated penalties for violators of the rules.

I personally would consider the posts that have gone on concerning Hayek to border on intellectual malpractice for a historian of ideas.  That is not because I disagree with their thrust (which I admittedly do) but because of the way they have been presented and asserted.

One of the great benefits of the _scholarly_ community of HES has always been the presumption toward the principle of charitable interpretation.  This enables folks from wildly different intellectual (and ideological) perspectives to have serious conversations -- rather than rant sessions.  One check is to ask yourself if you could pass an ideological Turing Test, another is a more common sense approach which is don't say anything about someone's ideas unless you could be comfortable saying that in from of them.

This a reason that scholars don't just blurt out whatever thoughts come into their head at any moment in time.  Scholarship isn't (and definitely shouldn't be) about stream of consciousness emoting with a keyboard.

Yet this is ALL we are getting in this thread of wild speculation, wild charges, and unbelievable leaps of logic which have the same result on the pursuit of truth as asking someone "so when do you stop beating your wife, sir?"

Can we PLEASE return to the real business of SHOE rather than this?