====================== HES POSTING ====================== After returning from 2 very long days in the archives of Fritz Machlup and Friedrich Hayek at the Hoover Institution, it is hard to argue with Roy that much more archival work is essential to the health of the history of economic thought -- but this is not the same argument given earlier. My claim also goes further -- i.e. that history in all its forms, including straight forward archival research, is essential to the health of economics as a science as we turn into a new century. Consider this picture: all sorts of doors are shut to a superior explanatory strategy in economics based on many simple falsehoods and myths, which can be quickly disposed of with just a little work in the archives -- or even only with some effort to fill in the historical picture using published sources. I give some examples in my HES paper, presented last summer in Vancouver. I continually find it astonishing how little work has been done on Hayek -- and here I can testify from first hand knowledge that there is a bounty of original unpublished archival material which, as it becomes better known, will shape all future work on Hayek. Even a somewhat casual historical competence regarding Hayek gained only from published sources would change many of the narratives of the history of 20th-century economics that I find in the literature. How does one read the later essays of Hicks, and the UCLA oral history program interviews with Hayek, and come away without a transformed sense of the Hicks story -- a sense that is incompatible with the stories of Hicks that somehow leave Hayek out of the story (how is this possible?). Yes, more original historical research, and more archival research. -- But this is everyone's responsibility. Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside [log in to unmask] http://members.aol.com/gregransom/hayekpage.htm ==================== FOOTER TO HES POSTING ==================== For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]