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History of Political Economy Annual Supplement to Volume 34 (2002) 378-390



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Afterword

A Pall along the Watchtower:
On Leaving the HOPE Conference

Philip Mirowski


All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason becomes improbable . . . .
Does the good historian not, at bottom, contradict?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak

Precisely because the experience of the 2001 HOPE conference was a bit unnerving, I want to start out with a vote of thanks to Roy Weintraub and Craufurd Goodwin for coming up with the idea. Rarely have we enjoyed the opportunity to talk seriously and openly about the future prospects and pitfalls of our chosen field. So occasions such as this, where we collectively stare our predicament squarely in the face, are exceedingly scarce. It is even more rare to be confronted by the possibility that the history of economics as a disciplinary identity is on its last legs.

Now, the one capacity that you might suspect is congenitally rare in a collocation of historians is a well-developed ability to engage in futurology. Economists as a group have never enjoyed high lifetime completion averages in the realm of prediction; and I suspect people who have specialized in history are more inclined than most to avoid what can only be considered a high-risk, low-return activity like prognostication. True to form, few attendees at this conference engaged in any concerted reading of the tea leaves; more to the point, they tended to avert their gaze when it threatened to precipitate. Rather, the overriding impression I got from the papers and the conference was of a wistful sadness and a vague premonition of disaster; maybe nothing so portentous [End Page 378] as shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, but perhaps something more like a fire sale before the Wal-Mart opens up down the block. Of course, for the younger participants at the conference, with more to fear and less commitment to the cause, glancing nervously in the direction of the lifeboats was an understandable reaction.

It never hurts to entertain the idea that the inexorable tide of history may not be raising all boats; but what I might have expected from self-identified historians located primarily in economics departments (although that is changing, too) would have been adoption of a more analytical approach to the predicament of the history of economic thought (HET), perhaps accompanied by a greater attempt to situate the prognosis in a larger context, be it that of the economics profession, or the larger university setting, or perhaps even larger cultural attitudes toward forms of legitimate research at the turn of the millennium. We did get some of that, especially from our European counterparts—and the contrasting health of the European and Japanese professions was one of the surprises of the conference—but I can't shake the feeling we did not really yet manage to get down to brass tacks. It doesn't help matters to suggest that the field has “always” been held in contempt (Blaug 2001); that's a prescription for paralysis and, anyway, is historically inaccurate, as I argue below.

As if it weren't enough to own up to the snubs and slights that are a daily penance for the historian of economics, I think we should also face up to the fact that there are in place some imposing structural obstacles in North America to the prospect of a flourishing program of research into the history of economics in the next millennium. Margaret Schabas (this volume) alludes to the first obstacle in her essay when she complains that the field is saddled with the designation history of economic thought. Most of us at some point in our career have had to endure some philistine calling what we do “economic history,” but I doubt that the situation is ameliorated by opting for the opposite extreme of limiting the ambit of research to some disembodied “thought” thinking itself. Taking “thought” as our primary area of expertise is perhaps our first major stumbling block...

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