===================== HES POSTING ==================== I would like to offer a belated thank you to Ross Emmett for his effort to define Whig history, external, and internal for the people in our discussion group. This was a time consuming task, and one that I certainly wasn't up to at this point in the semester. I especially want to applaud his effort to minimize the absolute importance of internal and external to doing good, thick history. When I used these terms in my recent book on Keynes, I ultimately found it necessary to say that the terms are suggestive in pointing to "something" that moves the discussion along, but that like all theory they are limiting and so have limits. Tony Brewer is quite right to say that the sense of what is external and internal may change in context. I think that Tony Brewer is wrong, however, to say that Sam Hollander is the only neoclassical historian of thought of prominence. People like George Stigler and Paul Samuelson have published a steady stream of articles in top journals during the last 25 years that have shaped the sense of what is acceptable history of thought in the mainstream. Even more than these two has been Don Patinkin. I would say that in different degrees these are the prominent Whig, neo-classical historians of economic thought. I also think that an enormous amount of Whig history of thought has been published that falls under Ross's point b: by people who are on the "losing end" of the theeoretical debate in the last three decades and who have gravitated to the "history of thought" as a place where they can try to back up and show where and when their side should have won. One finds this kind of "history" done by virtually every heterodox school of thought; "histories" of this sort are published in the journals of the dissenting groups and in mainstream journals by the leading lights of these groups. But while I have sympathy with some of these schools, I find the "history" they do to be poor history at best. It is this kind of work that I think can be appropriately termed both Whiggish and internal; it argues from narrow point of view (whose equations are right) and focuses on the equations and their derivation to the virtual exclusion of everything else. People can't be stopped from doing this kind of work, but I wish they wouldn't call it history. It certainly rarely qualifies. Brad Bateman Grinnell College ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]