The question I wish to broach then is "what defines a legitimate contribution to the subdiscipline `The History of Economic Thought'?" As will become clearer below, my answer develops from a belief in a distinction between individuals who have an interest in the history of economic thought, and those who produce work in the field. Let me explain.
In the Summer 1996 meetings of the History of Economics Society in Vancouver, I attended a session which discussed the role of historians of economics. Peter Boettke of NYU remarked that his colleague Israel Kirzner is thought of by other members of the NYU department as an historian of economics. This is so, presumably, because Kirzner writes from a perspective which engages arguments historically, and Kirzner cites writers from the older canon like Smith, Mill, etc.. As Boettke remarked however, Kirzner takes offense at this identification, and insists that he is a theorist not an historian. Boettke's and Kirzner's colleagues are in all likelihood individuals who work in areas of modern economics like game theory, econometrics, and the many varieties of applied economics. The forms of argumentation with which they are familiar, and which they are trained to evaluate within their various subdisciplines, involve stating problems clearly, abstracting, and modeling the economic problematic of a particular subject. They employ tools of mathematics, applied mathematics, statistics and econometrics to solve the modeling problem that they have posed. Arguments will have the form of if-then statements, and they will be linked to arguments of others who have written on very similar themes, and who have produced discussions of the phenomena in relatively similar terms. These economists will not cite Adam Smith, nor will they refer to John Maynard Keynes. Instead, their references will be to recent work in either the premier generalist journals or the specialty journals of the specific subdiscipline.
Suppose you are an economist in the sense that you insist on your legitimate membership in the community of economists. Suppose though that you are not a theorist as "being a theorist" is understood within the community of economic theorists; neither are you an econometrician, or a labor economist, or an international trade economist or a health economist, or any of the usual hyphenated-economists. What kind of economist can you be? An answer comes readily to mind if you write about or cite long dead economists: you are a historian of economics! What else can a you be? In the late twentieth century American university/academy where departments of economics do not recruit young people to be Austrian economists, Post Keynesian economists, Marxian economists, institutionalist economists, neo-Ricardian economists, etc., all members of variously marginalized groups within the economics profession who on occasion employ historical references as arguments are considered to have become historians of economics. Put roughly, to be an economist of the marginalized variety is to live under the great big tent of history of economics. At least this is how "real" economists see all the marginalized folk. It is not of course certain that any particular Post Keynesian thinks of herself as an historian of economic thought, just as Boettke suggested that Israel Kirzner is sure that he is a theorist, not an historian. The problem is that theorists don't consider Kirzner to be one of them. And since meetings of the History of Economics Society include sessions on Hayek, Keynes, Ricardo-Sraffa, institutionalists, and Marxians, it appears that an interest in or identification with Austrian economics would fit comfortably on the program of the History of Economics Society meetings.
In my view there are problems with those meetings. For a paper which argues that Keynesian perspectives, with full citation and reference -- chapter and verse -- from The General Theory can contribute to a understanding of the present Latin-American debt crisis, or a paper which shows how Marx in Volume x, Chapter y fully understood and can provide an explanation for corporate downsizing in the telecommunications industry of modern America, are not contributions to the history of economics. They may, of course, be contributions to the literatures of Marxian economics or Post Keynesian economics. But it is my contention that there is necessarily a difference between what constitutes a contribution to the subdiscipline of Post Keynesian economics and what constitutes a contribution to the subdiscipline of the history of economics.
In her 1992 HOPE essay "Breaking Away," Margaret Schabas identified the conflict between the disciplines called "History of Economics" and "Economics" as she wrote "there is now, however, an entire generation of professional economists who have probably never read Marshall or Keynes, and who probably only have a superficial understanding of either the history of economics or economic history. This suggests that economists, at least in the United States, are now no more likely to develop historical intuitions than physicists or physiologists. In short, the umbilical cord has been broken. Economists, by insisting on technical progress, have lost the means to think historically and thus will no longer cultivate an affinity for the history of economics, or at least a non-Whiggish history of economics. Historians of economics must someday come to terms with this conceptual barrier. As I see it, they might as well break away and form an alliance with historians of science." (page 197)
The history of economic thought "profession", our scholarly specialization, has in Professor Margaret Schabas its lone representative trained in, and teaching in, a history of science department in a North American university. However in recent years several prominent historians of science (e.g. Norton Wise and Ted Porter) have taken an interest in, and have written about, subjects which were previously of a concern only to historians of economics. This small set of connections between the history of economics and the history of science was reinforced with Philip Mirowski's appointment at Notre Dame as Carl Koch Professor of Economics and The History and Philosophy of Science. The two subdisciplines, each somewhat marginalized within their respective larger scholarly communities of historians and economists, are beginning to meet in journal issues, cross-citations, and conferences despite the general lack of attention given to economics as a science by historians of science, and sociologists of science. There is no consensus on the nature and connection of the two subdisciplines. To be sure there is some expression by professional historians that historians of economics would be "better" historians if they were more open to the history of science literature, but among historians of economics there seems to be less interest in addressing the larger community of historians.
I have no strong opinion on whether or not the community of historians of economics should break away from the community of economists to seek an institutional home, as the historians of physics have, within departments of history or history of science programs. Yet I believe most strongly that the standards by which a piece of work in the history of economics must be judged are precisely those the standards by which a piece of work in the history of physics should be judged or by which a piece of work in the history of molecular biology should be judged. Specifically, the standards we must live by are those employed by professional historians to evaluate and appraise historical writing.
In order to graduate with a doctoral degree from a recognized history program, one must demonstrate in the written work a command of the research skills of an historian, and the craft to write, that is to interpret, the various primary and secondary sources. By contrast, a contribution to Post Keynesian economics, as would be required by acceptance in, say, the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics or the Cambridge Journal of Economics, would require the author to advance knowledge within that particular subdiscipline. The standards and modes of argumentation vary from subdiscipline to subdiscipline: the rhetoric of a paper in the Journal of Human Resources will differ from the rhetoric of a paper in the Journal of Radical Political Economy. And the rhetoric of each of those papers will differ, and strikingly so, from a contribution to the history of economics.
As Ted Porter noted, in his comment on Schabas's piece: "[T]echnical history, after all, has often served an apologetic function. This, I must emphasize, is by now greatly attenuated in historical studies of natural science. I regret to add that history as legitimation is still very strong in the history of economics. And this, I think, may be the decisive reason why historical work on recent economics has made so little impression on a generation of historians who insist on their autonomy from science. Unfortunately, many historians of economics are so completely socialized as economists, and so little as historians, that the genre of historical study is not fully distinct from that of the review essay. The review essay surveys a field and assigns credit, almost always on the assumption that knowledge is steadily progressing. Far too much history of economics, still, aims to extend the review back twenty or fifty years by presenting the ideas of the economist on some modern question. The precursor, long dismissed as a category mistake in history of science, is still alive and well in economics, and this is almost inevitable so long as history of economics is written to meet the standards and presuppositions of ahistorical economists." (p. 235)
It is not as if the model I am recommending is alien to economists. It is precisely the model that has been established in the subdiscipline of economic history. Economic historians hold joint appointments in departments of economics and departments of history, and some economic historians have their primary affiliation with history departments. Nonetheless, the standards for writing and publishing and professional acceptance in the discipline of economic history are different from the standards of labor economics or international trade. They are informed by the historians' notions of evidence and modes of employing evidence in argument. They conform to the historians' ideas of research, researchability, and rhetoric which employs those research results in the construction of argument. Robert Fogel, Gavin Wright, and Robert Gallman have a position within the field of American history which does not tarnish their standing within the economics profession. And just as there are a small number of historians of economics who hold appointments within departments of history or programs in the history of science, my argument would suggest that number should be very much greater.
Obviously my argument extends naturally to the subdiscipline of economics called methodology of economics. This subdiscipline should, by analogy, employ the rhetoric of philosophy of science and hold itself exactly to those standards to evaluate contributions in the methodology of economics. There are, to be sure, a few philosophers whose specialty in the philosophy of science is the philosophy of economics: Alexander Rosenberg, John Davis, and Dan Hausman come immediately to mind. And there are several methodologists of economics who publish in mainstream journals of philosophy of science, though the number is also small. Nevertheless this cross disciplinary respect has been present and is embodied in the editorial position of the journal Economics and Philosophy. It is no longer acceptable for an economist to write on Friedman's methodological position, or Popper's falsification ideas in economics, without grappling with a large, complex, and often interesting secondary literature of real philosophical sophistication. Put another way, a Post Keynesian, or institutionalist, who argues that the epistemological foundation of neoclassical economics is flawed and that the Post Keynesian or institutionalist perspective provides a sensible alternative will not receive a warm welcome from the editors of Economics and Philosophy. The place to contest issues of institutionalist versus neoclassical explanations of the behavior of large pharmaceutical companies is not in the pages of History of Political Economy, nor in Economics and Philosophy. Instead, those arguments must be joined in the pages of the American Economic Review. If institutionalist economists do not receive a hearing within the economics subdiscipline appropriate to the institutionalist's argument, the solution is not to add a passage on Wesley Clair Mitchell or Thorstein Veblen and submit the heretofore rejected paper to the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.
I retain the hope that over time writing and research in the history of economic thought will increasingly approach the standards of historical writing in the history of physics or the history of mathematics or the history of medicine. But I am also left with the hope that over time the interests of economists will be engaged by the history of their discipline, and their discipline's ideas, in the same respectful way that physicists and mathematicians purchase and read histories of physics and mathematics. When as many economists have read Groenewegen's biography of Alfred Marshall, or Skidelsky's biography of Keynes as physicists have read Westfall's biography of Newton, or statisticians have read Stigler's history of statistics or biologists have read Judson's history of molecular biology, the subdiscipline of history of economic thought will have an appropriate place among the subdisciplines of economics and history.