====================== HES POSTING ====================== I note the process of Professor Gunning's reply. The process involves taking items in succession and interpreting or redefining them so that they serve a particular issue in the discourse. This is one element in the historian's craft. [Should I say art?] What modern, or, in some instances, postmodern, historiographers do is note the variety of such elements and their effect on the issue of history [memory, recollection]. In the postmodern period, in consequence of the past and present multiplication of such elements, given the multitude of past and present cultures [mindsets, information environments, epistemes] of which we are now aware, history has become the history of historiography. Turning this to the question of Whig history [Both words are adequately defined in most dictionaries.], and specifically the Whigishness of some historians of economics: that history selected its methods of recollection with a view to creating the future, not to recreating the past. It was ethically active, in the first instance, and scientific, only in the second. There is, of course, nothing wrong with that. Indeed it is laudable. Its just that it should be recognized for what it is. There is much more to be said on this matter, and a great variety of things about which much more is to be said; but I refer the receivers of this message, again, to Hutton's HISTORY AS AN ART OF MEMORY. Its not that Hutton has anything to say specifically to historians of economics, or that I think his is the last word, [or that he has given us a well constructed and well written book], but he does open up alternative approaches to history, and thereby he casts light on what one might make of Whigishness in economic history, or any other style, point of view, procedure, or bias in the writing of history. Merry Christmas. Robin Neill ==================== FOOTER TO HES POSTING ==================== For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]