Once and Future Historians: Notes from Graduate Training in Economics

Based on a True Story

Besides, if you are bothered by the idea of this [story] being real, you are invited to do what the author[s] should have done and what authors and readers have been doing since the beginning of time: Pretend it's fiction.

—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)

The last time that we unself-consciously identified ourselves as students with research interests in the history of economics was in our graduate school application essays. In retrospect, we might be tempted to add, several schools let us in anyway. Today, our answer to the question, “What are your research interests?” varies depending on who is asking. How is it, then, that we should find ourselves on a panel presumptuously called “The Next Generation”?

Our experience with the history of economics (history of economic thought, or HET) is embedded within our larger experience as graduate students in economics.¹ We are concerned here with the relationship between becoming “good economists”—as represented by the implicit and explicit criteria imposed by faculty and other graduate students—and the subdiscipline of the history of economics. We wish to describe how our identity as economists and as historians of economics is rooted in ambivalence and equivocation and how this identity is shaped by the reactions of faculty and other graduate students to the statement: “I am (maybe) a historian of economics.”

In spite of our presence on this panel, we must admit to an ambivalent relationship with our future in the history of economic thought. This ambivalence is expressed mainly by the subordination of our historical research interests to our other (mainstream economics) research fields. This essay will attempt to describe how this happened. We wish to describe the concealment of our history of economics research interests as a response to the characterizations of the history of economics as an extracurricular activity and possible job market liability. We wish to describe how these characterizations have rendered our historical studies less significant than we originally intended and to consider the consequences of our equivocation for the field.

Our uncertainty and insecurities with the history of economic thought can perhaps be understood in two ways. On one hand, it may reflect a “normal” groping for an intellectual identity among graduate students. This essay can be read, in conjunction with the essays by Matthias Klaes, Stephen Meardon, and Esther-Mirjam Sent (this volume), as a chapter in an intellectual coming-of-age story, with the expected elements of melodramatic gloom. On the other hand, this essay may also reveal some of the larger challenges (or opportunities) currently facing the discipline of the history of economics, as these are played out in the lives of graduate students. While our personal futures with the history of economic thought are surely not of general interest, we leave it for the reader to determine what this essay (read with the other contributions to this panel) may imply about the future of the discipline more generally.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell:
The Field That Dare Not Speak Its Name

One might not expect to find people concealing a research interest in the history of economics in a department with a weekly workshop or field exams in the subject. And yet many aspects specific to the Duke department make concealment rather simple. It is possible to choose the history of economics as one of your three fields of specialization, in conjunction with two more “mainstream” choices. The history field requirements are, in large part, independent of your dissertation. It is completely possible and not uncommon to have a field in the history of economics (satisfied through coursework, workshop attendance, and an oral exam) without a history of economics dissertation. More common is the “one-chapter” approach—writing one chapter of your (usually...