====================== HES POSTING ====================== Conversation (and "intellection" generally) is aided by examples. It might help to clarify matters if an article or two (or a book or two) in the history of economic thought were picked out at random, and then discussed in terms of its virtues and defects as a contribution to the history of economic thought, e.g. an article or two out of HOPE or The European J. of the H. of Econ. Thought. For example, what is the relation of the current discussion of 'Whig' history to Donald Walker's "The Structure of Walras's Mature Model of Capital Goods Markets", or Nahid Aslanbeigui's "The Cost Controversy: Pigouvian Economics in Disequilibrium", in the Summer, 1996 issue of the European J. of the H. of Econ. Thought? Or to Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel's _The Invisible Hand_ or Frank Machovec's _Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics_? Almost always we are better at evaluating examples than we are at evaluating abstractions untied to cases. What are the cases that inform the abstractions? Greg Ransom Dept. of Philosophy UC-Riverside [log in to unmask] ================ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ================ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]