Sitting on a Log with Adam Smith: The Future of the History of Economic Thought at the Liberal Arts Colleges

The question may have arisen in your minds, Why do reasonable people studying economics attach some importance to the history of the subject? Well, the history of the subject is not necessarily important to you in professional life, unless you aspire to teach the subject matter later on.

—Lionel Robbins, A History of Economic Thought:
The LSE Lectures (1998)

When economists ask if a subdiscipline has a future, you can almost be sure that they mean, “Does it have a future as a field on the ‘cutting edge' of research?” The question is not an idle one. Only twenty years ago, the field of development economics was being eulogized in many quarters. And until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the subdiscipline of comparative systems was a largely moribund field, not yet transformed into the alluring new field of “transition economics.” Subdisciplines do rise and fall.

What economists mean when they talk about the vitality of a subdiscipline is captured nicely in Paul Krugman's book Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (1995), in which he argues that fields in which the theorists cannot (or do not) work in the dominant mathematical discourses suffer neglect and disregard. He explains that both economic development and economic geography, despite their importance, languished after midcentury because their questions were not being framed in the dominant economic models of the late twentieth century.

Without citing all the literature, it is no surprise that in a world in which subdiscipline success depends on this kind of formula, the history of economic thought has suffered a perpetual crisis of self-confidence during the last fifty years. For many years, for instance, the odds were better than 50 percent that the topic of the presidential address at the History of Economics Society annual meeting would be a defense of the subdiscipline.¹

Note, however, that all of the kinds of thinking about the subdisciplines of economics that I have described so far depend solely on research for their understanding of what constitutes success and survival. Without at all denigrating the importance of research, it is nonetheless possible to frame the success and future of a subdiscipline in other terms.²

A Success Story:
The History of Economic Thought at the Liberal Arts Colleges

If you want to see an active and vital practice of the history of economic thought, you need to look no further than the hundreds of small liberal arts colleges in the United States. These colleges, unique to the American educational system, are focused on the education of undergraduate students; by all indications the economics faculty at these schools think that teaching the history of economic thought is an important enterprise.³ Seventeen of the top twenty liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings (fall 2000) list at least one course in the history of economic thought in their course catalogs, and fourteen of them offer the course regularly (see appendix 1). In Minnesota and Ohio, two states with a large and diverse set of small liberal arts colleges, 80 percent of the liberal arts colleges list the history of economic thought in their course catalogs, and 70 percent of them offer the course regularly (see appendix 2). Not surprisingly, a large number of the jobs advertised every year in the field are at the small liberal arts colleges.⁴

So just what are these small liberal arts colleges? And why are they teaching a subject that so many people fear is irrelevant or even dying? Because the audience for this essay is international, it seems worthwhile to step back and answer these questions, if only briefly, so that the phenomenon of the history of economic thought's success at the liberal...