===================== HES POSTING ==================== Dear HES'ers Returning belatedly to Whig history, and Ross Emmett's outline on 24 Nov. My view, something of a spanner in the works, is that the notion behind the Whig interpretation of history really has to be confined to just that - the interpretation of history. I don't think it can be applied to intellectual history, unless one is dealing with the mediation of ideas and the historical/political process. Of course, a parallel version for intellectual history could be constructed - winners tell the story, losers get denigrated or (more likely) written out of the account of past exchanges. However, this needs another name. Nothing immediately comes to mind. The 'Wig' interpretation of the history of ideas (on account of the implied cover-up)? The Whig interpretation of history must necessarily be 'externalist', i.e. deal with context, even if it is pushing 'rightness' & 'inevitability'. (which by the way, is all it can do, as the notion of moving from error to truth in history doesn't apply). The Whig interpretation of ideas might be externalist, but it is more likely to depend on internalist mores (the evolution of falsehood to truth through reason and accumulated wisdom). [How can one interpret the rise and continued success of (the varieties of) neoclassical economics by an adequate externalist account? impossible without incorporating sociological elements which hardly give succour to any notion of the accumulation of 'truth content'.] Having said that, I think economics have does in its midst an excellent example of the Whig interpretation of history (but of course the example necessarily involves the mediation of ideas with historical process). The example is the interpretation of the nature of mercantilism as an historical epoch, and the doctrines which accompanied that 'period'. The conventional wisdom is that both the period and the ideas were a terrible mistake - mercantilist thought as incoherent and wrong-headed; mercantilist practice as wrong-headed. OUr authorities are Smith and Viner and, to a lesser extent, Heckscher. Viner, in particular, uses an internalist view of economic ideas (the medieavel and mercantilist periods were the dark ages because the theory of the specie flow mechanism had not come along. After Hume posited it, mercantilist thought and practice was doomed of necessity.) The people who thought differently - the historical schools before WWI, and a declining number of economic historians after WWI until about the 1960s - are treated as ill-informed. Well at least they were when there was a debate. The last 20 years has seen this lot not being reproduced, so the debate has been consigned to the archives. Whig history then in application - universal free trade as utopia; any divergence as a product of ignorance and the success of 'rent-seekers'. And in the process, economists deny themselves the possibility of an understanding of the whole history of trade policy and international economic relations. Evan Jones Economics Department University of Sydney Oz ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]