===================== HES POSTING =================== WHIG HISTORY OF ECONOMICS IS DEAD Now What? James P. Henderson Valparaiso University Let me pick up a thread that runs through the two previous editorials, those by Roy Weintraub and Phil Mirowski: WHIG HISTORY OF ECONOMICS IS DEAD. R.I.P. Now what? Much of the work done in the history of economics during the second half of the twentieth century fits the description offered by Andrew Pickering in his "Distinguished Guest Lecture," at the 1995 meeting of the H.E.S. The history of economics "is the genre known as history of ideas. In its canonical form this tries to understand scientific ideas as evolving under their own inner logic. . ." (Pickering, forthcoming). The history of economics has tended towards internal history, concentrating on the economics ideas and relegating the life and times of the economist and the contemporary institutions to the background. Yet economics is fundamentally social, so the social construction of economic knowledge must be a central concern. Paraphrasing Wade Hands - economics is practiced in a social context, the products of economic activity are the results of a social process, and economic knowledge is socially constructed (Hands, p. 75). Moreover, there is a tendency is to ignore "time" while constructing the history of economics. By ignoring time, I mean we see the ideas of economists in their final form instead of trying to understand how those ideas were developed over time. Admitting that "Whig history of economics is dead," and recognizing that "economic knowledge is socially constructed," frees us to try other approaches. We might turn our attention to developments in other disciplines where "much mileage has recently been got by sociologising and contextualising the picture" (Pickering, forthcoming). Here is how these two approaches are described: The sociology of scientific knowledge approach has sought to display the social interests that sustain the particular bodies of knowledge that one finds associated with particular groups; and, less theoretically, the historiographic avant garde would probably agree that the best history of ideas is contextualist, relating specific ideas to their historical, cultural, social, etc, contexts (*Ibid*.). Both of these approaches emphasize the view that economics is a knowledge-producing enterprise. This shifts the focus to the process of constructing the economic knowledge--the economists and their interests and concerns and objectives, the institutions where the knowledge was constructed, how the knowledge so constructed emerged over time. The demise of the Whig view of history makes our intellectual lives as historians of economics much more complicated. According to the historian of science, David Knight, in his article "Background and Foreground: Getting Things in Context," this approach requires "hard work among the archives of some institution or scientist, eminent or obscure . . . [and rejects the] wide-angle lenses in favour of close-ups." For Knight it is "a real journey from one world to another; the eagle's to the mole's" (Knight, p. 7). To focus on context requires that we find out what concerned intellectuals at a given time, how were they educated, what was their intellectual life like and how did they interact with society. Having read the masterworks of the economist, what now? One can start by exploring what Bernard Cohen calls "information networks." Economists operate in a scientific community, a group of like-minded economists or others simply interested in economics. Cohen's description of the Scientific Revolution which "produced a new kind of knowledge and a new method of obtaining it, [and] produced new institutions for the advancement, recording and dissemination" of that knowledge, applies equally to the creation of economics (Cohen, 1985, p. 81). Such information networks are both formal and informal. Informal information networks include correspondence and face-to- face visits, but a "formal information network" requires specialist journals and reports, which are customarily sponsored by learned societies and academies. In British economics, the *Economic Journal* and the British Economics Association (later Royal Economics Society) were the realization of such cultural practices and institutions. But prior to 1890 when they were founded, economists had four other national learned societies which welcomed them and their ideas: the Political Economy Club of London (organized in April, 1821), Section F (the Statistical and Economics Section) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (admitted at the third meeting in 1833), the London (later Royal) Statistical Society (founded by the organizers of Section F, it held its first public meeting in March, 1834), and the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science Association (organized in the summer of 1857 by Lord Brougham, it held its first Congress in October of that year). In addition to these national organizations, economists could present their ideas at local learned societies, for example, Jevons's papers at the Manchester Statistical Society. There is a wealth of material in the Reports, Transactions, and Journals of such organizations that remains largely unexploited by historians of economics. That economic masterwork that we know and love, is the result of a process of investigation and discovery that occurred over time. What was the writer's original objective? Why did the writer select that issue? Why did she take that particular issue so seriously? That economist was not locked away in a garret, completely isolated from social, economic, and intellectual events. Correspondence, early manuscripts, papers presented at learned societies are a rich source of material revealing how the economist's ideas developed over time. Those ideas were tried out on others, presented in a setting where the economist believed that her ideas were welcome and were they would get a fair hearing and where the criticism would be constructive. These change the course of the development of those ideas. What intellectual tools were available to him? It is important to remember that mathematics too has a history. So does scientific methodology and philosophy and statistics, both the gathering of data and its interpretation. How did he use the analytical tools available to him? If the available analytical tools were inadequate or inappropriate, how did he respond? Did he create new tools? Adapt tools from other disciplines? One of most enlightening exercises one can undertake when trying to capture the essence of the context that engaged an economist is to read the contemporary reviews of the new masterpiece. We know it to be a masterpiece, but did the author's contemporaries? Do not limit yourself to reviews in specialist economics journals, for some of the most interesting reactions appear in the popular journals of the day, *The Quarterly Review*, *The Westminster Review*, *The Edinburgh Review*, come to mind in the British case. Also look in the journals of other disciplines. There are fascinating treatments of Alfred Marshall's *Principles* in *International Journal of Ethics*, *Mind*, and the *Economic Review*. A contextual approach requires that we recognize that economic knowledge is created in real time. Pickering focuses on scientific culture, which he extends beyond the simple notion of a field of knowledge, to include "culture" in the broader sense of the "made things" of science--"skills and social relations, machines and instruments, as well as scientific facts and theories" (Pickering, 1995, p. 3). To that list, we add the information network created for the advancement, recording and dissemination of economic knowledge. Here's where things get complicated, for context is not constant. Pickering offers us an intriguing approach, one that Esther-Mirjam Sent employed so successfully that she was awarded the "Joseph Dorfman Prize for the Best Dissertation" by the H.E.S. in 1995. Pickering explores "the mangle of practice"--the process of modeling as it develops over time. Modeling is an open-ended process. "A given model can be extended in an indefinite number of ways; nothing within the model foreshadows which should be chosen." To comprehend the practice of economics necessitates "understanding closure, . . . understanding why some individual or group extends particular models in particular ways." The key to understanding closure appears to lie in the observation that models are not extended in isolation. Modeling typically aims at producing associations in which a plurality of projected elements hang together in some way. And the important point here is that the achievement of such associations is not guaranteed in advance--particular modeling sequences readily lead to mismatches in which the associations are not achieved. The modeling sequence is an interactive process of "Resistance" and "Accommodation." The development of the model gives rise to resistances which impede the achievement of goals. Encounters with resistance set in train a process of accommodation, in which the openness of modeling is further exploited in trial-and-error revisions and substitutions of models, modeling sequences, and so on, aimed at proceeding further toward the intended association. The process of accommodation itself precipitates further resistances in and to practice, so that practice in the end appears as a goal- oriented dialectic of resistance and accommodation. Successful accommodations overcome resistances in a series of "Free Moves" and "Forced Moves." The free moves in the modeling process are those active components of scientific practice where the scientist confronts a resistance free to exercise choice and discretion. The forced moves, the passive components of practice, intertwine with the free ones and serve to elaborate the scientist's choices in ways that are beyond her control. Faced with resistances as consequences of the forced moves, she is led to revise some of her free moves. Given the absence of universal scientific standards, these free and forced moves can be traced over time in an attempt to understand the alternatives available to her, the choices she made, and the consequences of those decisions (Pickering and Stephanides, 1992, pp. 140--141 and Pickering 1995, chapter 1). These two related approaches--"sociologising and contextualising"--if adopted to the writing the history of economic offer promising possibilities for our discipline. But first, we must take these approaches seriously and abandon Whig history. REFERENCES Cohen, I. Bernard. 1985. *Revolution in Science*. Hands, D. Wade. 1994. "The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Some thoughts on the possibilities," *New Directions in Economic Methodology*, Roger E. Backhouse, ed. Knight, David. "Background and Foreground: Getting Things in Context," *British Journal of the History of Science* 20 (1987), 3 -- 12. Pickering, Andrew and Adam Stephanides. 1992. "Constructing Quarternions: On the Analysis of Conceptual Practice," *Science as Practice and Culture*. Andrew Pickering, ed. 139--167. Pickering, Andrew. forthcoming. "The History of Economics and the History of Agency," *The State of the History of Economics: Proceedings of the History of Economics Society* _____. 1995. *The Mangle of Practice, Time, Agency & Science*. ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask] ______________________________________________________ Department of Economics 426 Decio Hall University of Notre Dame (219)631-6979 (O) Notre Dame, IN 46556 (219)631-8809 (F) http://www.nd.edu:80/~esent mailto:[log in to unmask] ______________________________________________________