Will Economics Ever Have a Past Again?

The sciences are unique among creative disciplines in the extent to which they cut themselves off from their past, substituting for it a systematic reconstruction . . . . Such reconstruction is a precondition for the cumulative image of scientific development familiar from science textbooks, but it badly misrepresents the past.

—Thomas Kuhn, The Road since Structure (1987)

From the curricula they construct, economists apparently regard the history of economics as a subdisciplinary field within economics, symmetric as a subfield with labor economics, public finance, or economic development. Indeed, that perspective is instantiated in the Journal of Economic Literature subject classification system. Based on their pedagogy, economists appear to believe that one studies core subjects to become socialized as an economist; then one masters several fields of specialization for teaching purposes; and finally one selects a problem in one of those fields in which to become a specialist as a scholar or researcher.

This argument parallels economists' ideas of what goes on in, say, mathematics, where basic work in algebra, analysis, and topology is thought to define the core training, which is followed by work in fields like algebraic number theory or Lie groups. Economists likewise believe that core work in mechanics (quantum, classical, statistical) and electromagnetism is followed by fieldwork in solid-state condensed matter or elementary particles.

Yet in neither mathematics nor physics does history have a place. While history of mathematics is occasionally found in undergraduate programs in mathematics, the history of physics (like the history of chemistry) is more usually taught in the department of history, possibly cross-listed in physics (or chemistry) if the scientists can bring themselves to offer credit for that which they consider to be nonscience. Of course, what is true in mathematics and physics and chemistry is now true in economics as well. Whereas once upon a time the history of economics was a required core course for economists, no longer is that so. But more to the point, in doctoral training programs in nearly all North American universities, the history of economics is not even a field course, and this is increasingly true in doctoral programs in Europe and the antipodes as well.

Despite this fact, History of Economics Society (HES) and European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) presidential and distinguished fellow addresses employ a rhetoric of good health concerning the subdiscipline of the history of economics. Believing that this cheerfulness masked some real structural problems for the field, I began in 1999 to organize a group of scholars to consider the state of the history of economics as a discipline in the new millennium. The occasion for this review was the annual HOPE conference, in this case the HOPE 2001 conference, held (fittingly) in the Millennium Hotel just off the Duke campus in Durham, North Carolina, 27–29 April 2001. The conference was sufficiently animated that the discussions were continued in a closed mail-list through eh.net over the next few months.

The conference call did not circumscribe approaches to assessing the health of the subdiscipline, for there are a variety of ways to gauge this. Nevertheless, three main paths seemed to present themselves. The first is essentialist. If when considering how the subdiscipline fits into the larger disciplinary whole as a cognitive enterprise one finds that its health is essential to the health of the larger economics, then it follows that the subdiscipline must be maintained in a healthy way if economics is to prosper. That philosophical or theoretical move produces arguments that travel along specific lines. For instance, one may argue that since economics is a historical discipline (the essentialist move), not a scientific one, cutting economics off from historical argumentation is logically incoherent. Alternatively, one may argue that economics is a scientific discipline (the essentialist move), but that the best ways to do science themselves are contested, and so the most successful gambits of science...