Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was delivered as the Jérome Adolphe Blanqui Lecture to the European Society for the History of Economic Thought on April 30, 2006 in Porto, Portugal. With the usual caveat, I am grateful for extensive comments on earlier drafts from Roger Backhouse, Simon Cook, Neil De Marchi, Paul Dudenhefer, Deirdre McCloskey, Phil Mirowski, Alex Rosenberg, Margaret Schabas, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and two anonymous referees.
Notes
1That the role for, and status of, the history of economics is different in Europe and Japan from that in the U.S. and UK is apparent, but I have nothing to say in this paper about their different histories—I leave it to others more informed than I am to illuminate the cross cultural differences (see though Weintraub Citation2002b, and the contributions there which discuss the traditions of HET in Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Spain and Portugal, and the Netherlands.).
2The paper appeared in the American Economic Association's Journal of Economic Perspectives and probably had the largest circulation of any piece written by a historian of economics in the last decade.
3But see Backhouse Citation(2004) for a partial reconstruction of the UK story. An essay by Craufurd D. W. Goodwin Citation(forthcoming) titled “The History of the History of Economics” will be published in The New Palgrave, Second Edition.
4As quoted in Guillory (Citation2002, p. 483).
5The most fair-handed and cleanly argued discussion of this is appears in chapter 8 (“Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies”) of Smith Citation(1997). Her new book (Smith Citation2006) enlarges on and extends the arguments made there.
6It might be thought that a similar role could have developed for the history of economics, namely one of attuning citizens to the importance of economics and its success in shaping the modern world. Unfortunately, however, economics was not so understood, possibly because many individuals believe that they themselves know more than economists about the issues that economics deal with. Despite Keynes's line about “madmen in authority,” the discipline of economics never did have the prestige of physics in that post Great Depression era. By the time there were Nobel awards given to economists, suggesting an “arrived science,” the “history of economics” had been replaced by the “principles of economics” as the site for general education of those informed citizens. And despite attempts to use some history of economics in such a course, neither the Samuelsonian “potted” historical textbook inserts, nor secondary reading in Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers (1953), ever really shaped the intellectual content of the large introductory course.
7This passage continues (p. 549) by noting, however, that “With [J. Robert] Oppenheimer's defrocking [in 1954], scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues.”
8This differed from the public's general perception of economists, who in that period were characterized for instance by President Harry Truman as offering policy advice of the “on the one hand, on the other hand” variety. Unlike physicists, economists disagreed, and were seen to disagree, on many matters of fact and theory and policy.
9It was in this period of course that the Rockefeller Foundation, and then later the Ford Foundation, began to fund giant programs involving teams of economists.
10See Kuhn's response to a comment by Joseph J. Spengler about “crises” in economics: he wrote: “In the physical sciences disagreement about fundamentals is, like the search for basic innovations, reserved for periods of crisis. It is by no means equally clear that a consensus of anything like similar strength and scope ordinarily characterizes the social sciences” (Kuhn Citation1977, pp. 221–22). In his Structure (1962, p. 160) however he was to note: “It may … be significant that economists argue less about whether their field is a science than do practitioners of some other fields of social science. Is that because economists know what science is? Or is it rather economics about which they agree?”
11It is a bit paradoxical to note that the Marxist communitarian view, opposed to seeing scientific geniuses as the engineers of scientific progress, was taken over and stripped of its ideological wrapping. Now “community” was to be a historically contingent actor, not a historically necessary one. But of course the “freedom” that defined the liberally human scientists, and their community, was often contrasted to, say, Lysenko-ism.
12It was in the 1970s, for instance, that Sidney Weintraub, at the University of Pennsylvania, was no longer able to teach his Macroeconomics graduate course using only Keynes's General Theory as the text, or the graduate Price Theory with required readings from Marshall. Indeed, from that period on to his death he was allowed to be a teacher of undergraduates only.
13Mark Perlman tells of how, early in the history of the Journal of Economic Literature (it began in 1969), he dramatically increased the number of JEL citations in history of economics by unilaterally deciding that articles about the meaning of Keynesian economics would be moved from the Macroeconomics classification to the History of Economics classification. See also Backhouse Citation(2004) for the detailed story of these moves in the UK.
14 The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), Chapter 2, section 10 is titled “The Naturalistic Approach to the Theory of Method.” In it Popper argues against naturalism, and concludes “Thus I reject the naturalistic view. Its upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe themselves to have discovered a fact they have only proposed a convention. Hence the convention is liable to turn into a dogma. This criticism of the naturalistic view applies not only to its criterion of meaning, but also to its idea of science, and consequently to its idea of empirical method” (p. 53).
15To scan the ideas and approaches encompassed, see Bagioli Citation(1999).
16There were, to be sure, some people involved in science studies who were “debunkers” in one or another sense. Their own use of language mocking or undermining the normal ways of talking about science was quite in evidence. Feminists who deplored the unwittingly gendered accounts of, say, human reproduction, or Marxists who argued that modern science was a feature of the Cold War's military-industrial complex, allied themselves often with science studies. The larger point remains, though, that science studies itself was not an “anti-science” movement even as some who wished to de-legitimize science's role in the modern world (Ross Citation1996) embraced elements of the science studies analyses.
17What is not so often understood is that science studies scholars themselves (for example, Ashmore et al. Citation1989, Yonay Citation1998) began writing about economics in this period.
18One of the most distinguished mid-twentieth century American sports commentators, who trained as a lawyer, was reviled by a large fraction of the American television public for his outspoken commentary which was frequently critical of the players, coaches, and practices of the sports he commented on. Indeed, Howard Cosell's (1985) autobiography was called I Never Played the Game.
19As good evidence of this distinction, Mirowski's historical work is not denigrated by economists nearly to the extent that his critique of modern economics elicits ire. McCloskey's (1986) analytic work on rhetoric was not a flash point in the same way that her use of rhetorical analysis to criticize mainstream econometric practices produced forcefully argued and finally compelling rebuttals (Hoover and Siegler Citation2005). And I, no critic of mainstream economics, am understood by economists to be a somewhat offbeat historian, but friendly. As Maskin (Citation2004, p. 173) commented, reviewing Weintraub Citation(2002a): “The book's organization is rather unusual, at least for a history of economic thought (perhaps books on the natural sciences in the Science Studies tradition by which Weintraub acknowledges being influenced also follow unorthodox formats).”
20A quick and dirty count, using titles and personal knowledge of participants, from the 2005 HES Meeting produced fifteen sessions on “old” economics, fourteen sessions which were decidedly heterodox in nature, and nine sessions of “other” which included things like my own session on “Life Writing.” The 2006 ESHET Conference in Porto had roughly nine “old,” seventeen “heterodox” and nineteen “other.”
21A referee worried that there are many other reasons for individual economists to have distanced themselves from the history of economics. Of course that is the case, but it would appear that such other “reasons” are unsystematic, perhaps idiosyncratic, but certainly ahistorical.
22This of course is reminiscent of Paul Davidson's “exclusion” from the graduate program at Rutgers, discussed in Mata Citation(2005).
23Mirowski, for example, argues that since the modern university is fragmenting under the pressures of commercialization, there is growing room for interdisciplinarity, like economic science studies, in the emergent interstitial formations (Mirowski Citation2005). Whether one agrees with his analysis or not, the evidence for his claim is real, and we both are exemplars of it: even as his own position in the “standard” department of economics has disappeared, Mirowski retains his chair in the history and philosophy of science. And for my own part, in addition to teaching science studies as well as the history of economics, I co-edit a book series on Science and Cultural Theory with the eminent (and disciplinarily unclassifiable) Barbara Herrnstein Smith.
24For instance, Mary Morgan at LSE has her primary appointment in the Department of Economic History; Kevin Hoover is now a Professor of Economics AND Philosophy at Duke University; Erik Angner is in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Margaret Schabas is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, etc. Such a list though misses individuals who have, or have had, careers “outside”: for example, Evelyn Forget in Community Health Sciences, and Tom Humphrey at the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank.