Coming Together: History of Economics as History of Science

At the other extreme is the antihistorical school, which is now common in the United States, where the history of thought is regarded as a slightly depraved entertainment, fit only for people who really like medieval Latin, so that one can become a full-fledged chartered Ph.D. economist without ever reading anything that was published more than ten years ago.

—Kenneth Boulding, “After Samuelson, Who Needs Adam Smith?” (1971)

If one revisits the early years of History of Political Economy, one cannot help but be struck with the impression that the field was already very much on the retreat. Kenneth Boulding (1971, 232–33) deplores the lack of historical thinking in the education of American economists; A. W. Coats (1969, 9) observes that the pressures of government and business have rendered the history of economics into “an unnecessary luxury or, more frequently, . . . a wasteful diversion of time and energy.” Their complaints have withstood the tests of time. While the history of economics, at least in American universities, is often recommended if not required for undergraduate students of economics, most graduate students never take a course in the subject. The history of economics is more deeply woven into the curriculum in France, the Netherlands, and Japan, for example, but the situation in the United States is unlikely to improve anytime soon. Research in the field, however, has grown, in that there are more journals, more books, and more active scholars than ever before. But the economics profession has grown as well, such that our constituency in the profession is at best 1 percent.¹

Adaptation is often the key to survival. It will come as no surprise for those who are already familiar with my work that I am a keen advocate of treating the history of economics as a branch of the history of science. Some articles in History of Political Economy, for example those by Paul Christensen (1989), Salim Rashid (1981), and Richard Romano (1982), had already begun to steer the subject in that direction. These were followed by some books that linked the two fields, notably Ingrao and Israel 1987, Mirowski 1989, and Schabas 1990. And since I published my “Breaking Away” manifesto in 1992, many more works have appeared that draw firm connections between the history of economics and the history of science.² The most notable contribution in this respect is Philip Mirowski's edited volume, Natural Images in Economic Thought (1994), which included articles by such prominent historians of science as I. Bernard Cohen, Ivor Grattan-Guinness, Sharon Kingsland, Camille Limoges, and Theodore Porter. Other monographs in this vein are those by Robert B. Ekelund Jr. and Robert F. Hébert (1999), James Henderson (1996), Judy Klein (1997), and Deborah Redman (1997). Historians of economics have also published numerous articles in mainstream history of science journals such as Isis, Science in Context, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. See, for example, the articles by Sergio Cremaschi and Marcelo Dascal (1998), Robert Dimand (1993), Francesco Guala (2001), Bruna Ingrao (1994), Gérard Jorland (1996), Robert Leonard (1998), Harro Maas (1999), Uskali Mäki (1997), Philip Mirowski (1992b, 1999), Bert Mosselmans (1998), Mary Morgan (1997), Esther-Mirjam Sent (2001), and Yuval Yonay (1994).³

As a frequent attendee at history of science gatherings, I have formed the impression that the history of economics is no longer viewed as a deviant pursuit. A cluster of collected volumes appeared circa 1990 that included one or more articles on the history of economics, notably Patrick Brantlinger's Energy and Entropy (1989) (with an article by the present author), I. Bernard Cohen's The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences (1994) (Camille Limoges, Giuliano Pancaldi, Margaret Schabas, and S. S. Schweber), Tore Frängsmyr's Science in Sweden (1989) (Sven-Eric Liedman), Tore Frängsmyr, John Heilbron, and Robin Rider's Quantifying Spirit in...