================= HES POSTING ================= On Mon, 11 Nov 1996 "James P. Henderson" wrote > WHIG HISTORY OF ECONOMICS IS DEAD > Now What? > (stuff omitted) > 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. (more stuff omitted) The claim that "economics is fundamentally social" seems to be important to Henderson's argument and to his rejection of "internal history", but it is far from clear what it really means. Economics deals with a social process, the production and distribution of wealth (Turgot), say. That doesn't make the subject itself social. (Astronomy isn't astronomical.) Economists write for an audience, and look at what their predecessors and contemporaries have to say, certainly, but doesn't that point to the importance of the internal history of the subject, not the opposite? The evolution of language is social, in a way that the evolution of economics (or physics) is not. Changes in usage, pronunciation, and so on are the result of multifarious individual choices by people who have no conscious intention of changing the language as a whole. Economics, by contrast, evolves through the work of individuals who are consciously striving to learn from and improve on their predecessors. Internal history must be important. The importance of "context" is similarly slippery. Of course context matters, up to a point. Classical economists, for example, assumed (near) subsistence wages because wages were near to subsistence. But again one must be careful. Hume, Quesnay, Steuart, Turgot and Smith were all writing at the same time, in the same context, but their theories were very different. (France v. Scotland doesn't work as an explanatory variable - Smith and Turgot were closer in their theories than either was to his compatriots.) I can't see that sociologizing is going to help either. The similarities and contrasts between them are in the texts, not the context. It was Smith's theories that dominated in the following decades. Why? Context and sociology may help, but might it not be that Smith's theories offered more convincing explanations of a wider range of observable phenomena than any of the others? Context, of course, to explain which problems were important and which explanations were seen as convincing, but close attention to the logic of the arguments too. Archives, biography, etc. may tell us something about the aims and methods used by each writer, but they can't tell us what it is that makes the Wealth of Nations stand out above other work of the time, or why it is still worth reading now. Another very brief example. A major part of Ricardo's motivation was to resolve what he saw as weaknesses and ambiguities in Smith. Without internal history, we literally couldn't make sense of his enterprise at all. So don't give up reading the texts and thinking hard about what they are trying to say. ---------------------- Tony Brewer ([log in to unmask]) University of Bristol, Department of Economics 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, England Phone (+44/0)117 928 8428 Fax (+44/0)117 928 8577 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]