================= HES POSTING ================= Tony Brewer writes to ask if it is really true that the history of thought in the last few decades has been largely Whiggish and internalist. I accept this as a fact, but others may not. I would take Judy Klein's posting about judging the HES essay contest to be some sort of confirmation that most contemporary work is Whiggish and internalist. I hope that others will weigh in with their own perceptions of the contemporary literature. My own experience is formed largely by reading a mountain of papers on Keynes in the last 15 years. One rarely reads a paper in this literature that is a good piece of history. The standard format in the genre is to identify some aspect of Keynes thought, explain why this is just like some aspect of contemporary thought, and to (implicitly or explicitly) argue by authority that Keynes's brilliance in seeing this point bolsters the position of our contemporaries who share this position. This is what I think of as "high" Whig history. That is, what is important about Keynes is what he has to say about contemporary debates on economic theory. Some of the people who do this with Keynes's work are neo-classicists. Some are Post-Keynesians. Some are Austrians. Some are rational expectationists. But I think you can see the picture. The style of argument is concerned with contemporary debates and uses the past pretty exclusively to adjudicate contemporary debates. Thus, when I started to write about Keynes, I wanted to read documents and discover what could be said beyond these ahistorical exercises in claiming the corpse. I wasn't interested in writing a history in this genre. I won't go any further in describing my own effort to write fuller, richer history since I've published an article in HOPE about my experience ("In the Realm of Concept and Circumstance", Spring 1994) except to make this one additional comment. What I have ended up trying to do (or just ended up doing) in my own work is to understand the theoretical structures as the were constructed. What ideas and experiences in Keynes's life led to the particular pages I'm trying to interpret. This involves looking at things like his early philosophical work and his later work in policy making, advising, and investing. I found that many of the misinterpretations I found in the "high" Whig literature could be de-bunked in this fashion. My own experience, which has kept me pretty firmly rooted in the equations and theories, as equations and theories, leads me to see much of what I read in the discussion surrounding Roy's and Jim's editorials as a fear of the unknown. Yes, people could write purely externalist histories that focus on the sociology of Adam Smith to the exclusion of his theories or about women's fashion trends at mid-century and their relationship to neo-classical theorizing. But that's not what those of us who advocate more attention to external factors are trying to do and most historians of economic thoguht would have no time for it if was what got published. I wish people could get past their reactionary fears and think about the real advances that can be made by trying to write better history. If you want to see what can done in this regard try reading Peter Clarke's "The Keynesian Revolution in the Making" or Ewen Green's "The Crisis of Conservatism". Both books show how economic ideas are shaped by policy needs and how ideas get changed and transformed in the process of their use. Great stuff! What a change to think about where ideas came from and how they're used. There's a whole world out there waiting for you, if you would just let yourself enjoy it and learn from it. But please, let's return now to Tony Brewer's question. Is anyone out there willing to argue that the discipline has not tended strongly toward Whiggish and internalist histories in the last few decades? Brad Bateman Grinnell College ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]