================= HES POSTING ================= First a positive reply to Roy, expressing the core of my agreement with him; then a negative response, identifying an area of potential disagreement: The root issue of Roy's editorial is that contributions to History of Economics are defined by the criteria or standards "employed by professional historians to evaluate and appraise historical writing." ***With this I fully agree.*** Lest my agreement with Roy be overlooked in the second part of this message where I express some reservation, let me say that I no longer identify myself as an "economist" in conversations about my research with other academics and the general public -- I identify myself as either an "intellectual historian" or an "historian of science." While most of my listeners often "get the message" that they need not ask me about interest rate trends and whether they should lock in their mortgages (who would ask a historian those questions?), some also recognize from my identification that my research is not driven by the criteria of economic analysis (I would not deny that I have a historiographic agenda, however!). Now on to the area of potential disagreement. I think Roy too quickly gives away to neoclassical economists a model of scientific theorizing which confirms the suspicion that "old" ideas are either already corrected or dead. In most of the other social sciences, "theory" courses are an amalgamation of historical and rational reconstructions (what someone in an earlier reply to Roy called history of doctrine and history of analysis) of classic "texts" in the field, and contemporary theorists orient their work in relation to those "texts." And as Greg Ransom pointed out, rational reconstructions of the Darwinian tradition are alive and well in biological theory. Perhaps the absence of powerful rational reconstructions in contemporary physical or chemical theory are more a sign of the contemporary *uniformity of agreement across those disciplines* than an indication that the conversational tradition in a so-called scientific discipline is more irrelevant to its present than it is in the humanities. And can economics really claim the *uniformity of agreement* that renders it unnecessary to recover lost elements of the conversational tradition? [I think not personally.] Finally, let me add that my potential disagreement with Roy is not a call to a "subversive" rehistoricizing of the economics profession. If I wanted to do that, I would have become an economic historian, not an historian of economics -- the opportunities to draw history back into the economics profession are much more promising there and in the New Institutionalism. I am a historian of economics because I want to explain the discipline of economics in the twentieth century. [Full stop] Ross Ross B. Emmett Editor, HES and Co-manager CIRLA-L Augustana University College Camrose, Alberta CANADA T4V 2R3 voice: (403) 679-1517 fax: (403) 679-1129 e-mail: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmettr ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]