================= HES POSTING ================= What defines a legitimate contribution to the subdiscipline `The History of Economics'? In late twentieth-century departments of economics, all individuals who resort on occasion to modes of argument which employ historical devices or who in their work quote or comment on Keynes, Marx, Veblen, et al., are regarded by their economics departmental colleagues as de facto historians of economics; sometimes even those individuals believe themselves to be historians of economics if they quote or comment upon Keynes, Marx, Veblen, et al. I submit that such individuals should not be so regarded, and that their work, however valuable as economics, does not constitute a legitimate contribution to the history of economics. In her 1992 HOPE essay "Breaking Away," Margaret Schabas wrote "there is now, however, an entire generation of professional economists who have probably never read Marshall or Keynes, and who probably only have a superficial understanding of either the history of economics or economic history. This suggests that economists, at least in the United States, are now no more likely to develop historical intuitions than physicists or physiologists. In short, the umbilical cord has been broken. Economists, by insisting on technical progress, have lost the means to think historically and thus will no longer cultivate an affinity for the history of economics, or at least a non-Whiggish history of economics. Historians of economics must someday come to terms with this conceptual barrier. As I see it, they might as well break away and form an alliance with historians of science." (page 197) Yet whether or not the community of historians of economics breaks away from the community of economists to seek a home, as the historians of physics have, within departments of history or history of science programs, the standards by which a piece of work in the history of economics must be judged are the standards by which a piece of work in the history of physics should be judged or by which a piece of work in the history of molecular biology should be judged: specifically, the standards are those employed by professional historians to evaluate and appraise historical writing. In order to graduate with a doctoral degree from a recognized history program, one must demonstrate in the written work a command of the research skills of an historian, and the craft to write, that is to interpret, the various primary and secondary sources. As Ted Porter noted, in his comment on Schabas's piece: "[T]echnical history, after all, has often served an apologetic function. This, I must emphasize, is by now greatly attenuated in historical studies of natural science. I regret to add that history as legitimation is still very strong in the history of economics. And this, I think, may be the decisive reason why historical work on recent economics has made so little impression on a generation of historians who insist on their autonomy from science. Unfortunately, many historians of economics are so completely socialized as economists, and so little as historians, that the genre of historical study is not fully distinct from that of the review essay. The review essay surveys a field and assigns credit, almost always on the assumption that knowledge is steadily progressing. Far too much history of economics, still, aims to extend the review back twenty or fifty years by presenting the ideas of the economist on some modern question. The precursor, long dismissed as a category mistake in history of science, is still alive and well in economics, and this is almost inevitable so long as history of economics is written to meet the standards and presuppositions of ahistorical economists." (page 235) It is not as if the perspective I urge is alien to economists, for it is precisely the model that has been established in the subdiscipline of economic history. That is, many economic historians hold joint appointments in departments of economics and departments of history. Sometimes economic historians have their primary affiliation with history departments. Nonetheless, the standards for writing and publishing and professional acceptance in the discipline of economic history are different from the standards of the subdisciplines of labor economics or international trade, or economic demography, or Post Keynesian economics. Informed by the historians' notions of evidence and modes of employing evidence in argument, for economic historians the standards of scholarship conform to historians' ideas of research, researchability, and rhetoric which employ those research results in the construction of argument. And I observe that Robert Fogel, Gavin Wright, and Robert Gallman have a position within the field of American history which appears not to not tarnish their standing within the economics profession. I retain the hope that over time writing and research in the history of economic thought will approach the standards of historical writing in the history of physics or the history of mathematics or the history of medicine, for I believe that only then will the interests of economists be engaged by the history of their discipline, and their discipline's ideas, in the same respectful way that physicists and mathematicians purchase and read histories of physics and mathematics. Thus I look forward to a time when as many economists have read Groenewegen's biography of Alfred Marshall, or Ingrao and Israel's history of equilibrium theory as physicists have read Westfall's biography of Newton, or statisticians have read Stigler's history of statistics, or biologists have read Judson's history of molecular biology. E. Roy Weintraub, Professor of Economics Director, Center for Social and Historical Studies of Science Duke University, Box 90097 Durham, North Carolina 27708-0097 Phone and voicemail: (919) 660-1838 Fax: (919) 684-8974 E-mail: [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.econ.duke.edu/~erw/erw.homepage.html ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]