A Companion to the History of Economic Thought - Chapter 29 pps

HISTORIOGRAPHY 491 CHAPTER TWENTY- NINE Historiography Matthias Klaes 29.1 INTRODUCTION The term “historiography,” literally “the writing of history,” carries two distinct meanings. On the one hand, it refers to historical accounts of the past, in contrast to the past itself. On the other hand, the term is used in a meta-theoretical sense as the reflection on how historians account for the past. Historiography in this second sense has two aspects. It may refer either to the particular historical methods employed by the historian, or to a broader reflection on the methodo- logy underlying her historical research. According to the broader interpretation, historiography is to the practice of the history of economics what the methodology of economics is to the practice of economics. An additional complexity arises because both history and methodology of economics are meta-discourses (cf., Emmett, 1997) in respect to the discipline of economics, which increasingly draw upon one another. For the remainder of this contribution, the term “historio- graphy” will be used to refer to the methodology, as opposed to the methods, of historical research. Finally, the relevance of historiography as a meta-theoretical reflection on the methodology of historical research in economics is of course not restricted to disciplinary history of economics but is equally relevant to economic history as the history of the economy, although this dimension will not be further explored here. Among the various ways in which one could discuss historiographic issues in the history of economics, two seem to suggest themselves in particular. One could provide a comparative overview of different historiographies that are currently employed or hotly debated in the history of economics. Alternatively, one could embark on a historical account of the development of the various approaches. The first perspective is much better served by the present volume as a whole than by any single work of survey. The second, further discussed below, suffers the handicap that so far at least, it refers to largely uncharted territory. This chapter therefore follows a different strategy, approaching historiographic reflection in the history of economics in the context of selected wider debates in 492 M. KLAES general history, philosophy, and the history of science. The ambition is not to aspire to comprehensive coverage of these debates, but to eclectically concentrate instead on a selection of themes that resonate with important recent historiographic developments in the history of economics. In what follows, the reader should also be warned that for the most part, historiography is discussed on the basis of the Anglo-American literature, notwithstanding the rich and longstanding historio- graphic traditions of continental Europe, for example. 29.2 HISTORIOGRAPHY AS META-DISCOURSE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH Historiographic reflection in the history of economics can proceed in several directions. What is it that distinguishes history of economics from the history of science, for example, or from general history, cultural and social history, intellec- tual history, the philosophy and methodology of economics, economic history, and, finally, economics itself? Related, although not strictly of a historiographic nature, are attempts to justify the pursuit of the history of economics, especially vis-à-vis the economics profession at large. On a more particular level, one may ask how the history of economics could be pursued, should be pursued, or is being pursued. Of this triad, the first inquiry typically takes the form of trying to identify dimensions by which histories of economics could differ from each other in principle. Historiographic debate has approached this question on the basis of various binary oppositions, such as relativist versus absolutist history, historical versus rational reconstruction, presentism versus contextualism, internal versus external, thick versus thin, or social versus conceptual history (cf., Backhouse, 1994, pp. 1–9). Once potential differences in historical approach are identified, it is only a short step to engage in normative appraisal of these differences. Historiography turns thus into a project of establishing how the history of economics should be pursued. Answers to this question tend to depend on one’s particular position regarding the nature of the history of economics, and on one’s underlying philo- sophical view on economics (Weintraub, 1999). A particular offshoot of this norm- ative reflection has been the issue of “Whiggism” in the history of economics: the focus on the progressive perfection of economics as a disciplinary body of knowledge. Most contributions to this debate have dismissed Whig history of eco- nomics, but as a genre it continues to be alive and well in the field. Finally, historiography may engage in positive reflection upon the history of economics. The question would no longer be how history of economics could or should be practiced, but how it actually is being practiced. With few excep- tions (e.g., Popescu, 1964; and more recently Backhouse, 2001) this approach to historiography has not been pursued at any notable scale in the history of eco- nomics, in contrast, for example, to the situation in general history (White, 1973). In many respects, positive historiography follows from the suspicion that many historians and sociologists of science have developed toward traditional norm- ative methodology. The equivalent argument within economics has been most HISTORIOGRAPHY 493 forcefully put forward by the “rhetoric of economics” literature (McCloskey, 1985, 1990; Klamer, 1988). In reflection of these post-foundationalist developments both in the philosophy of science and the methodology of economics, and in contrast to the normative strands of the historiography of economics, positive historio- graphy looks at the writings of historians who are trying to identify empirically how the ongoing enterprise of history of economics has developed and changed over time. 29.3 HISTORIOGRAPHY IN GENERAL HISTORY In general history, introductions to historiography frequently start with a refer- ence to the Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke (for a commendable short introduction to general historiography, see Arnold, 2000). Used as an exemplar, Ranke is typically described as the “father of modern historiography” (in this context, see Smith, 1995) for his insistence that the task of the historian should be the strict presentation of facts to establish “what actually happened,” based on close study of historical sources and abstaining from sweeping attempts to judge the past (Ranke, 1874 [1824], pp. v–viii; and abused, see Repgen, 1982). This appeal to historical evidence and the historical method, reacting to German idealism, was meant to place history on a scientific footing and distinguish it from a more liberal attitude toward historical detail by Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire. Fidelity to its sources is still regarded as the virtue sine qua non of professional historical scholarship. In that respect at least, Ranke’s program of objective history has survived to this day. Whether a continuous detailed unearthing of historical facts will accumulate to historical truth is a more controversial issue. Once a distinction between the past and the account of it in historical scholarship is acknowledged, a one-to-one mapping between the two must become problem- atic. All that is ever accessible to the historian are the records of the past, not the past itself. Arguably, due to the complexity of the available source material, historians are likely to find more than one plausible way to reconstruct the past from its archives. Moreover, it is debatable whether the compilation of a chron- icle, as a mere compilation of historical facts, exhausts the objective of historical scholarship. To the extent that the historian is supposed to provide a richer account of the past, be it in terms of historical context, interpretation of periods of transition, or historical explanation, she has to decide on the relative signific- ance of particular events of the past. Let us refer to this one-to-many relationship between the corpus of historical sources and the historian’s rendering of the past as the “historiographic hiatus.” Rankean historiography has had an important impact on the history of eco- nomics through Butterfield’s (1965 [1931]) attack on the “Whig interpretation” of history. The term “Whig” originated as a term of abuse against political opponents, in particular in the context of seventeenth-century English reform movements, where it was applied to supporters of the Calvinist tendencies in the Anglican Church. Butterfield, in drawing from the traditional usage, employed “Whig” 494 M. KLAES as a disparaging term against a nineteenth-century historiographic tradition – epitomized by the historical work of the Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay – which described English constitutional history as the progressive perfection of liberal parliamentary democracy. In a similar way, “Whiggism” in the history of economics is typically used to discredit accounts that are informed by a commitment to rational or scientific progress in the development of eco- nomic theory, and exhibit a tendency to evaluate past theories in the light of present-day knowledge. As charges of Whiggism in the history of economics are in danger of replacing serious debate with ambiguous knock-down arguments, it is worth bearing in mind from which side of the historiographic debate these charges were initially made. According to Butterfield (1965 [1931], p. v), the Whig interpretation of history consists of “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” The crucial ingredient of Whig history is its subordination of the past to the present. As the archetypical ex- ample, Butterfield refers to the Whig historian’s quest for origins as a naive search of the past for analogies to the present. Proper historical research, according to Butterfield, should proceed in the descriptive tradition of Ranke. The unfolding of historical events is too complex to be amenable to macroscopic explanations or generalizations. Instead of reading the present into the past, the historian should make the past her present. Accusations of Whig history have thus a certain reac- tionary connotation, in spite of their use in the history of economics to bolster “new” historiographic approaches. With the advent of the linguistic turn in historiography and the emergence of a “new history” in the 1970s and 1980s, general history is marked by a more gen- eral opposition between a traditional paradigm on the one hand, and a diversity of new approaches on the other (Kozicki, 1993; Burke, 2001). This opposition has provoked a number of traditionally minded historians to paint dark pictures of intellectual crisis (e.g., Evans, 1997). What is at issue can again be approached via the historiographic hiatus. What constitutes a historical source needs to be historicized in the first place (Jenkins, 1995, pp. 16–25). Put differently, the notion of “source” is not innocent but a historically constructed entity itself. Traditional history had been concerned with politics, largely based on official documents located in archives. This traditional constraint can be relaxed twofold. On the one hand, the question regarding what is central to the historical account may be answered differently, opening up the whole breadth of different topics currently found in social and cultural history, such as the history of madness (Foucault, 1961; Hacking, 1995), the climate (Grove, 2001), truth (Shapin, 1994), or the body (Porter, 2001). On the other hand, and related to the opening up of the historical field of investigation, what counts as a legitimate source for historical inquiry may be interpreted more broadly, extending beyond official documents to include other types of evidence such as literary sources or oral evidence (cf., Burke, 2001). Given that what counts as respectable historical subject matter and valid source material is subject to historical contingency itself, the more general HISTORIOGRAPHY 495 point which follows from the observation of such broadening of historical research is that the historian’s account turns out to be inextricably bound to her own historical locus, being thus subject to the same processes of social negotiation that she is studying herself with reference to the past. It is important to realize that this aspect of the historical hiatus precedes any hermeneutic issues involved in accessing the past. The reaction to the traditional paradigm of descriptive historical research can furthermore be divided into two different branches, depending on how historians have approached the tension stemming from the historiographic hiatus. Historians associated with the French Annales school for example, one of the most important challengers of traditional history, emphasized long-term structural change over myopic event history (e.g., Braudel, 1949; cf., Burke, 1990). The goal of the histor- ian turns into the quest of the underlying reasons for a particular development. Depending on the status given to the explanations obtained in this way, one may thus arrive at a historical project distinct from Rankean history, but nevertheless with a claim to scientific objectivity. Objective history may also be regarded as unattainable in principle. This under- current in the new approaches to history has led to unsettled calls of a looming intellectual crisis. Traditional historiography shows awareness of the limitations inherent to uncovering historical facts in a comprehensive and unbiased way. Nevertheless, striving for an incremental uncovering of the truth about events of the past remains the guiding ideal. In contrast to this, the literary branch of the reaction to historical objectivity, for example, maintains that historical writ- ing is subject to an inescapable fictional component. Similar to the rhetoric-of- economics literature, this branch has emphasized the narrative aspects of historical research, and in particular the role of figures of speech, such as analogies and metaphors (White, 1973; cf., Megill and McCloskey, 1987). This second branch is typically regarded as the “postmodern” successor to the modernist projects of both the Annales school and Rankean historiography (cf., Jenkins, 1995). Postmodern historiography has provoked sharp reactions (Monas, 1993). Liter- ary approaches to historiography are often accused of promoting an “anything goes” approach to the past, in which historians, and ultimately society, replace the reconstruction of the past with its invention. Although few historians with post- modern sympathies are committed to an anti-realist position regarding events of the past, these charges of idealist history have received renewed attention in the context of “holocaust denial” (Shermer and Grobman, 2000). If history has a fic- tional component that is essential to it, and not merely accidental, then the tension between traditional history and some of the more recent approaches appears indeed to reduce to a binary opposition between idealist and realist commitments to the past, quite in the same way as it is found in recent disputes in the philosophy and sociology of science (cf., Bloor, 1996). But, similar to the realist sociologist of scientific knowledge (Bloor, 1999), or Mäki’s (1988) realist position in the methodology of economics, historians may accept inescapable fictionality in their accounts of the past without having to give up a realist commitment to the past. It is interesting to note at this point that the most overtly idealist approach in general history, intellectual history or the history of ideas, has little to do with 496 M. KLAES the “new” histories of recent years. With the advent of the descriptive approach to history advocated by Ranke and his followers, the history of ideas developed as a pursuit distinct from general history, continuing the more broadly oriented and speculative elements found in the historical writings of the Enlightenment scholars from whom Ranke tried to break away. In the history of ideas, concepts are regarded as the “immutable mobiles” (cf., Latour, 1987, p. 227) of historical analysis. Take, for example, Lovejoy’s (1960 [1936]) classic study of the history of the idea of the “great chain of being,” which starts with Plato and ends with Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher and eighteenth-century German romanticism. As a stable entity, the idea is traced through time and space in its journey from one author to the next. Residing in the collective mental realm, it catches the attention of the historian only once it has manifested itself in particular expressions or concepts. These vary across contexts, literatures, and epochs. The historian is thus bound to tie the heterogeneous appearance of concepts in her corpus together into a coherent whole. The only criterion that she can apply is a prior understanding of the idea the history of which she wants to trace. Thus, her historiographic approach may closely resemble the Whig interpretation of history that Butterfield had so vehemently criticized (see, however, Samuels, 1974). From the perspective of the history of economics, intellectual history provides a crucial link to the more general historiographic debate. The 1960s act as a watershed in this regard. This period saw the emergence of new approaches to history, some of whose proponents fiercely attacked the history of ideas (e.g., Foucault, 1969). In addition, several historians of political thought, notably Skinner (1969), called for a rethinking of how their discipline approached intellec- tual history. Many historians of economics studied their subject from a perspective of traditional conceptual history. Closely related to the history of ideas, this historiography concentrates on locating precursors of currently relevant concepts and theories. The more general discussions around intellectual history were thus of direct relevance. So were the contemporary events in the history of science, where Kuhn’s (1970 [1962]) analysis of the role of paradigm shifts created suffi- cient upheaval to itself induce a paradigm shift. For more detailed appreciation of historiography in the history of science, in particular regarding the cross- connection to intellectual history and the history of ideas, the reader is referred to Kragh (1987). The first issue of History of Political Economy reflected these currents of the 1960s. The founding editors, conscious of their responsibility in shaping the self- understanding of the emerging subdiscipline, were adamant that the journal should not just be dedicated to “history of economic thought” (Goodwin, Spengler, and Smith, 1969, p. 1): “We wish to count among our contributors not only those devoted to unravelling the intricacies of the development of economic analysis but also scholars who explore the relations of theory and analysis to policy, to other disciplines, and to social history in general.” This spirit was most clearly expressed in the lead article of the first issue. Coats (1969, p. 12) criticized his colleagues in the history of economics for their insuffi- cient commitment to the past, and their predominant interest in the “succession HISTORIOGRAPHY 497 of particular theorems, theories or individuals.” Kuhn’s influence was openly acknowledged, and Coats tried to convince his readers that “[f]or the present generation of scholars the most fruitful research topics are the relationship of economic thought to policy and the sociology of economics.” (Coats, 1969, p. 14). The consolidation of the field around the new journal went thus hand in hand with an acknowledgment of and dissatisfaction with the different way of pursu- ing the history of economics which went before. 29.4 THE SYSTEMATIC RELEVANCE OF DISCIPLINARY HISTORY While the promotion of new approaches to the history of economics formed an important impetus to the 1970s emergence of the history of economics subdiscip- line in the Anglo-American realm, the underlying motivation was a growing loss of interest in the field by economic practitioners. More than four decades ago, Paul Samuelson (1954, p. 380) noted with contempt that it was those economists who were not sufficiently competent to follow the mathematical revolution of postwar economics who were seeking shelter in the history of economic thought. A little later, Donald Winch (1962) wrote a well-known essay expressing the worry that the history of economics was becoming as irrelevant for the discipline of economics as the history of physics for the practicing physicist. For Boulding (1971), it was of little surprise that postwar economics, with its aspirations to copy the style and success of the natural sciences, had turned away from the study of the “wrong opinions of dead men.” According to a common perception, the history of economics formed an essen- tial part of economics in the 1930s and before (cf., Samuelson, 1987, pp. 181–2). The decline of the disciplinary standing of the history of economic thought, while an interesting phenomenon in its own right, points to the underlying question of the relationship between a given discipline and its history. On the one hand, one can cite the case of the natural sciences. The history of science has become an independent academic discipline and is largely housed outside the science faculties. There is little controversy over the question of whether an aspiring young physicist should read Newton’s Principia, for example. The consensus is that she is better advised to invest her intellectual energies in more contemporary pursuits, leaving Newton to the historians, although even this very clear division of labor has not provided for a trouble-free relationship between scientists and historians of science (cf., Reingold, 1981). In philosophy, on the other hand, no student will escape detailed study of the classical authors. It is interesting to note, though, that the relationship between philosophy and its history is as controversial as in the case of economics. Gracia (1992) has pro- vided a comprehensive analysis of this debate. His classification of the different reasons for doing history is applicable beyond the realm of philosophy and will serve as the framework for the present discussion. Gracia points out that by asking for a justification of the history of philosophy one implicitly acknowledges that philosophy and history of philosophy are compatible in principle. He distinguishes this position from incompatibilism and historicism. 498 M. KLAES Incompatibilists deny any relation between philosophy and its history. Philo- sophy is concerned with the truth-value of propositions, while its history is con- cerned with the beliefs of past philosophers, independent of their truth-value. According to this view, the past is an obstacle to clarity. Philosophy should not be concerned with the errors of the past, but should always start from scratch. Historicists, on the other hand, deny a cut between the present and the past. Philosophy is concerned with the continuous rearticulation of a view about ourselves and the world. In order to get over the presumptions of the model in which one operates, it is necessary to uncover its origins. In its extreme form, this position holds that philosophy is inextricably trapped in its history. To do philo- sophy means to study past philosophers. Applying Gracia’s further discussion to economics, it will be granted for a moment that economics and its history are neither incompatible nor identical pursuits. This makes it possible to ask for the value of the history of economics from the perspective of a practicing economist. According to what Gracia calls the “negative” view, the history of economics does not offer more to economics than does the history of physics to physics. It is of little value for economic research because it stultifies creativity, encourages antiquarianism, and takes up precious time – which is already too short for keeping up with the rapid develop- ments of the present, and, if one is lucky, with some relevant aspects of economic history. The history of economics is thus only of interest to historians of eco- nomics, and possibly to historians of science and related fields of general history. This view is exemplified in economics by Hahn (1992, p. 165): “What the dead had to say, when of value, has long since been absorbed, and when we need to say it again we can generally say it much better.” The “affirmative” view, on the other hand, defends the value of history for practicing economists. Gracia distinguishes among three different strategies of justification. The rhetorical justification sees history as a source of inspiration, support, and respectability (cf., Landreth and Colander, 1994, p. 16). Past eco- nomists can serve as role models for the current generation or may teach us humility. Moreover, “by standing on the shoulders of giants we can appear to be very tall indeed” (Gracia, 1992, p. 142; cf., Schumpeter, 1994 [1954], p. 4). According to the second strategy, which Gracia calls the “pragmatic” justification, history provides case studies of good and bad reasoning from which we can learn, or which we can utilize to teach the subject to students (cf., Screpanti and Zamagni, 1993, p. v). Furthermore, those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it (cf., Blaug, 1985, pp. vii, 711). Finally, history may play a liberating role in making us aware of our presuppositions (Roll, 1992, p. 2). It may even offer a therapy in the face of a sick and confused present (Gracia, 1992, p. 148), which may partly explain the strong interest in history of economics among heterodox schools. Gracia’s third strategy of justification provides theoretical reasons for the beneficial nature of history. A systematic study of the past may give us important clues for the understanding of present trends and future developments in eco- nomics, which may influence our personal research strategy. Investigations of this kind could perceivably be pursued within the new economics of science if HISTORIOGRAPHY 499 applied to economics itself (cf., Sent, 1999). Furthermore, there are positions that justify the history of economics independently from its systematic relevance. Apart from references to human curiosity, there is the example of Schumpeter (1994 [1954], p. 5) who suggests that the study of disciplinary history reveals the working of the human mind. Backhouse (1985, p. 2; 1995, pp. 44–5) defends the view that history can and should be used to evaluate and appraise the economics of both the present and the past. Returning to Gracia’s initial distinction between incompatibilism, compatibilism, and historicism, there is one way to argue in favor of the history of economics which constitutes an important variation of the last of those three positions. According to the historicist position, present thinking is inextricably bound to its past. In other words, the only way to philosophize would be to engage in the history of philosophy. Similarly, the only way to do economics would be to engage in history of economics. While no historian of economics would want to subscribe to such a radical formulation, historicism in the historiography of eco- nomics may be defended in a qualified sense. The historicist points out that even the present that we study is already part of the past. In the history of economics, Boulding (1971, p. 227) has reversed this position by introducing the “principle of the extended present.” The disciplinary present is defined as that interval during which a given debate is not yet closed. To the extent that the historian of eco- nomics works within this interval, she actually engages in the current discussion. This amounts to the following “weak” version of the historicist position. While studying the past is not the only way, it nevertheless represents one way to do economics, at least in the confines of the extended present. One precondition for contributing to an ongoing economic debate is, however, that the work of the historian exhibit a “conceptual” dimension (cf., Klaes, 2001). A second prerequisite relates to the type of history being pursued. A social his- tory of the discipline of economics that pays little or no attention to economic content is an unlikely candidate for contributing directly to a debate. This is not to deny, though, any indirect influences that such an account may eventually have on the self-understanding of the profession. On the other hand, there are examples like Sraffa, whose close reading of the works of Ricardo led him to form- ulate a new interpretation of his theory of value and distribution that inspired a neo-Ricardian tradition in modern economics. 29.5 (RE)CONSTRUCTING HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION As indicated in the introduction, historiographic reflection on how to approach the history of economics has frequently resorted to mobilizing a number of binary oppositions. Probably the most prominent one has been the absolutism– relativism dichotomy: “The relativist regards every single theory put forward in the past as a more or less faithful reflection of contemporary conditions [ . . . ]; the absolutist has eyes only for the strictly intellectual development of the subject, regarded as a steady progression from error to truth” (Blaug, 1985, p. 2; cf., Skinner, 1969). An absolutist approach to the history of economics will result 500 M. KLAES in the writing of history from the perspective of a set of economic insights and theories that are accepted as valid standards of judgments for the insights and theories encountered in the historical interval considered. These standards may be drawn from “state-of-the-art” economics, in which case the resulting history is likely to read as Whig history. A relativist approach, on the other hand, strives to assume an agnostic stance toward the validity of past theories. Within historiographic discussions in economics, there has been an unfortunate tendency to run debates about the absolutism–relativism distinction together with the general issue of adequate exegesis of historical source material, and thus with aspects of the historiographic hiatus discussed above. The historian of economics, the argument goes, is bound to read the past from the present because her ultimate frame of reference for understanding the past must be her own temporal location in the present. Interestingly this argument, intended to support the absolutist position, unwittingly acknowledges the relativist proposal of a hiatus between sources and historical account. By rejecting the idea of an “objective” reading of a given source, the temporal location of the historian becomes decisive for the unlocking of the past. For economists and historians of economics, this should not come as a surprise. Long and arduous debates on the “correct” interpretation of the work of promin- ent economists abound. But to read past texts from the perspective of a given theory – as required by an absolutist historiography – is not quite the same as the requirement imposed on us by the inescapable hermeneutical circle of approach- ing any given text on the basis of only a provisional level of understanding. In his influential article, Skinner (1969) has called the tendency of absolutist historiography to retrieve from sources of the past instances of the putative application of present-day concepts the “mythology of doctrine.” In the history of economics, the mythology of doctrine has been forcefully exposed by Tribe’s (1978) study of the sharp discontinuities of interpretation between, for example, the economic concept of “labor” in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, which puts into question absolutist historicizing in its attempts to construct an a priori continuity of understanding between the present and the past. Properly con- sidered, this continuity should be regarded as a hypothesis that must stand up to historical scrutiny itself, lest the absolutist reconstruction of the past risks turning into an ahistorical construction. A further confusion easily results from uncritically running together Whig history with absolutist historiography. While Whiggism presupposes absolutism, an absolutist stance as such contains no commitment to a history of progress. By relaxing Whiggism to teleological historicizing one may, for example, engage in a project inverse to Whig history by describing historical developments in terms of progressive decline, but still judged from an absolutist perspective. Heterodox histories of economics occasionally come near this temptation of telling the emer- gence of modern economics from the perspective of a past Golden Age. To complicate matters, many historians, following Blaug (1990; cf., Rorty, 1984), have begun to replace the absolutist–relativist terminology with that of rational versus historical reconstruction. Historical reconstruction should interpret past theories such that their original authors would recognize and accept them [...]... rational reconstruction The task of historical reconstruction is to recount “how actual history ‘misbehaved’ in the light of its rational reconstruction” (Lakatos, 1971, p 107) The historical reconstruction of “actual history is thus unintelligible without reference to the rational reconstruction of the latter, in the same way as footnotes – an analogy very aptly chosen by Lakatos – relate to the main... Lakatos and Blaug–Rorty historical reconstruction The crucial distinction between the Lakatosian interpretation of historical reconstruction and Mertonian externalism, first noted by Kuhn (1971), was that, in the framework of Lakatos, external factors, by definition, distort the rational M KLAES 502 scientific quest for truth Historical reconstruction has in fact turned into the residual category of rational... into a relativist account of both error and truth 29. 6 CONCLUSION Where does this leave the opposition of rational versus historical reconstruction and thus of absolutism and relativism in the history of economics? Even if one accepts Lakatosian rational reconstruction as a convincing conceptualization of the broader usage of “rational reconstruction,” the two contrasting interpretations of “historical... reconstruction can be regarded as a particular interpretation of the rationalist commitment underlying both Mertonian “internal” history and Blaug–Rorty rational reconstruction It is precisely Lakatos’s aim to make the criteria explicit by which the historian decides how to reconstruct past science Rational reconstruction rests on a particular philosophy of rational progress in science: the historian adopting... relativist account of knowledge As in general history, some versions of relativism in the history of science are compatible with a fundamentally realist commitment Unfortunately, in the heat of what is frequently an emotionally highly charged debate, the finer points and distinctions risk getting lost Compared to these debates in general history and the history of science, historiographic discussion in the history. .. The history of economic thought as intellectual history History of Political Economy, 6, 305–23 Samuelson, P 1954: Some psychological aspects of mathematics and economics Review of Economics and Statistics, 36, 380–6 —— 1987: Out of the closet: a program for the Whig history of economic science In M Blaug (ed.), The Historiography of Economics Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 181–90 Schumpeter, J A 1994... sense of crisis provoked there, the “science wars” that followed the Sokal affair have polarized current discourse (cf., Anon., 1997) Again, at stake is what counts for real, there in terms of our access to the past, here in terms of our access to the present and future At the bottom of the Popper–Kuhn debate lurks the same challenge, of confronting the idealist dimension that is present in any relativist... such an approach “will omit everything that is irrational in the light of his rationality theory” (Lakatos, 1971, p 106) If the historian happens to implement Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programs, she will thus concentrate on the development of the hard core of these programs Conversely, it would thus seem that the sociology of science and its domain of external factors correspond to Lakatos... has been attracting increasing attention in the history and methodology of economics (Mirowski, 1989, 1994; Weintraub, 1991; Mäki, 1992; Hands, 1997) The Mertonian program was premised on a distinction between a disinterested search for truth on the one hand, and the influence of social factors external to this rational process on the other hand While Merton emphasized that these external factors had... debate History of Science, 30, 333–69 —— 1994: A Social History of Truth Chicago: The University of Chicago Press Shermer, M and Grobman, A 2000: Denying History Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Skinner, Q 1969: Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas History and Theory, 8, 3–53 Smith, B G 1995: Gender and the practices . historical research. According to the broader interpretation, historiography is to the practice of the history of economics what the methodology of economics is to the practice of economics. An. to the historian are the records of the past, not the past itself. Arguably, due to the complexity of the available source material, historians are likely to find more than one plausible way to. or generalizations. Instead of reading the present into the past, the historian should make the past her present. Accusations of Whig history have thus a certain reac- tionary connotation, in spite of