At one point to amuse myself I went around the Economic History Association meetings asking different economists what was the "bare minimum" you had to "believe" to be an economist (or to be able to use the results of mainstream economic research, not exactly the same thing). I got a lot of different answers -- ranging from constrained maximization to "the demand curve slopes down". I asked this for two reasons. First, I was getting kind of tired of historians assuming that if I was going to use economic analysis of any type then I had to be assuming that people are all individualistic profit-seekers with no other type of motivation whatsoever. Second, a historian friend had verbalized to me what I think is in the back of a lot of my history colleagues: economics is not an academic discipline; it is a belief system. My own micro training focused on constrained maximization (or minimization--the Dual) -- same with applied courses -- you started out on the blackboard with a utility function U=(a,b,c ...) and yoyu Max U(a,b,c ...) subject to (s.j.) a vector of constraints. Theoretically , anything goes -- whatever you can imagine goes in those parentheses. So quite sincerely I did not understand why so many people believed that economic research was limited to the market. Until I went back and read Samelson's first text, and further back and read Marshall (again -- read it in history of econ thot as a grad student) and then read a wonderful book about MArshall and economic history by ... (oh rats forgot the name) and the HOPE issue on Marshall and discovered the term "catalitics" (mispelled I'm sure, sorry). It really requires quite a different set of priors to go at economic analysis via Marshall/Samuelson (meaning Samuelson's heuristic paradigm, not his research) than the way I was taught. And further -- different specialties WITHIN economics require different sets of accepted priors -- money and banking does not study the same types of problems as urban or labor, for example. Except for the debate among psychologists and some economists about what "rational behavior" means, is there a literature on this? It would be helpful in being able to explain economics AS A DISCPLINE to historians if I could show the variety WITHIN economics. I also sense an unwillingness on the part of most economists to confront this themselves. The persona of the economist seems most comfortable with a "This is the TRUTH" stance -- if that other guy over there disagrees with me, well then he's WRONG (and maybe a fool, and maybe even dangerous). Having to talk about sincere diferences among economists according to when theywere trained and what type of research specialty they have seems to make them uncomfortable (a cause or effect of the decline of HET requirements?) Reactions? -- Mary Schweitzer, Dept. of History, Villanova