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How Should We Write the History of Twentieth-Century Economics?

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How Should We Write the History of Twentieth-Century Economics? OXFORD REVIEW OF ECONOMIC POLICY, VOL. 15, NO. 4 HOW SHOULD WE WRITE THE HISTORY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY ECONOMICS? E. ROY WEINTRAUB Duke University1 The modern economist looks at a textbook history of nineteenth-century economics and wonders what, for the twentieth century, will correspond to the chapter titles of ‘Malthus’, ‘Ricardo’, ‘The Mills’, ‘Marx’, and ‘The Rise of Marginalism’. Will monetarism survive editing? Will game theory rate its own section? Will Keynes be a hero or a goat? Economists look to the historian and wonders how the historian decides what is important, and how we go about deciding what will go into a future history book. Eschewing narratives of progress, this paper surveys alternative historiographies for constructing a history of twentieth-century economics, and suggests that the new discipline of science and technology studies provides a number of useful frameworks for telling the story. I. INTRODUCTION field. Faced with any claim of an exclusive or superior path to historical insight, the prudent response is to walk away Historians of science are imposing order on segments of murmuring, ‘live and let live’. (Reingold, 1991, pp. 364–5) the past, often in a ‘narrowing’ or ‘delimited’ way. Some- thing of this nature is inevitable when dealing with, to The modern economist looks at a textbook history of paraphrase William James, the great, blooming confusion nineteenth century economics and wonders what, of reality, past or present. The discourse of students of the history of science now admits more phenomena to the for the twentieth century, will correspond to the field, but without completely expunging older modes. chapter titles of ‘Malthus’, ‘Ricardo’, ‘The Mills’, Each of us can validly take a different slice of what we ‘Marx’, and ‘The Rise of Marginalism’. Will Mon- consider the subject. History of science is an eclectic etarism survive editing? Will Game Theory rate its 1 Surveying twentieth century economics, or economic thought, is a curious task, made more so by the fact that from whomever one seeks advice, one receives a scolding for leaving something out of the account. Without then holding them responsible for what appears here, I thank Gianni Toniolo, Neil De Marchi, and Craufurd Goodwin for their comments and arguments. I apologize to all those authors in my sub-discipline whose works could have been cited, but were not, because of space limitations. © 1999 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AND THE OXFORD REVIEW OF ECONOMIC POLICY LIMITED 139 OXFORD REVIEW OF ECONOMIC POLICY, VOL. 15, NO. 4 own section? Will Keynes be a hero or a goat? More generally, each method for appraising scien- Economists look to the historian and wonder how tific work attempts to distinguish successes from the historian decides what is important, and how we failures in science, and each defends the ‘right’ go about deciding what will go into a future history method as the one which produces successes. book. To economists, our task as historians appears Consequently, all alternative ‘methodologies’ for to be to ask how economic thought has changed economics would appear to have implicit winners over the century, to address the issue of why it has and losers in economic work: the winning economic changed, what are the significant issues associated ideas, those which emerged from the community’s with those changes, and what are the implications work, are the exemplars of the right methodology. for the future of economic thought. As befits a scientific discipline, this seems to most economists to require the historian to document/explain the II. INDUCTIVIST HEROES progress in economics over the century. Yet as we will see in what follows, while the idea of progress As befits a fin-de-siècle exercise, let us begin by makes sense to economists, it is problematic to asking how historians would have appraised twen- historians. tieth century winners and losers were the method- ology of 1900 to be treasured today. It is fairly clear Nevertheless it is certainly appropriate for the eco- that, at the turn of the twentieth century, science nomics community to ask ‘How do we know what itself, a fortiori economic science, was generally will endure of the twentieth century’s economics?’ understood to be inductivist. Many educated indi- Let me then begin to answer this question by viduals had read Karl Pearson’s The Grammar of describing several ways some historians of science, Science (1911), published in various editions be- and thus historians of economics, have sought to tween 1892 and the first decades of the twentieth ground their judgements in particular appraisal cri- century, and supposed it to be a fairly coherent teria. As we will see, each criterion carries with it a picture of exactly how science proceeded. Pearson ‘right’ way to narrate the history of twentieth century summed up his discussion of the method of science economics, and thus each implies a set of ‘chapter by arguing that titles’ for the century’s history of economics. the scientific method is marked by the following features: In his paper, ‘History of Science and its Rational (a) careful and accurate classification of facts and obser- Reconstructions’, Imre Lakatos (1971) argued that vation of their correlation and sequence; (b) the discov- every particular philosophy of science, that is every ery of scientific laws by aid of the creative imagination; system which develops a normative reconstruction (c) self-criticism in the final touchstone of equal validity for all normally constituted minds. (Pearson, 1911, p. 37) of science and the development of scientific knowl- edge,2 carries with it an associated historiography of Pearson, a phenomenologist, argued that the exter- science. For it is not the case that history of science nal world provided sense impressions which the provides case studies on which philosophers may human being interpreted through brain activity. Using test alternative conceptions of how science oper- the metaphor of the brain as a central telephone ates, but rather that each particular conception of exchange, Pearson had the scientists operating as how science operates constrains the narratives that interpreters of the messages from nature, classify- can be constructed in the history of science: ‘each ing and reconstructing data. The facts of science, internal historiography has its characteristic victori- and thus the facts of economics, ‘excite the mind to ous paradigms’ (Lakatos, 1971, p. 104). For example: the formation of constructs and conceptions, and these again, by association and generalization, fur- the inductivist historian recognizes only two sorts of genuine scientific discoveries: hard factual propositions nish us with the whole range of material to which the and inductive generalizations. These and only these scientific method applies’ (Pearson, 1911, p. 74). constitute the backbone of his internal history. When writing history, he looks out for them—finding them is What then might a forward-looking economist in quite a problem. (Lakatos, 1971) 1900 have forecast to be the important kinds of 2 In economics, these philosophical systems are called methodologies. 140 E. R. Weintraub economic analyses? It is unfortunate that econo- and Arthur Burns and later Milton Friedman, Anna mists did not have a David Hilbert, who at the World Schwartz, and others. They would feature as well Congress of Mathematics in 1900 set out what he work on business cycles connected to the NBER regarded to be the important unsolved problems in project, and sponsored by the Rockefeller Founda- mathematics, for with such a list historians of math- tion in institutes in Europe in the inter-war years ematics have been able to trace research agendas (Rotterdam, Vienna, Kiel, etc.) placing individuals in a number of different sub-fields of mathematics such as Jan Tinbergen, and perhaps Ragnar Frisch, over much of this century, allowing some con- in positions of prominence. Our stories of scientific textualization of ideas such as success and improve- success would highlight the economic ideas of ment and progress within the discipline of math- Wassily Leontief, whose careful classification sys- ematics. Absent a Hilbert, let us instead consider the tem of input–output tables allowed a finer and finer remarkable essay, Man in the Biological and representation of the structure of particular econo- Social Sciences, by Vito Volterra (1906), given on mies, and the usefulness of those representations in the occasion of his 1900 inauguration as Professor managing the command economies of countries in of Theoretical Physics at the University of Rome. the former Soviet bloc. The inductivist Pantheon Volterra, talking about the role that mathematics would include Simon Kuznets, and James Meade was likely to play in applied work, in economics and and Colin Clark, whose development of the ideas of biology specifically, in the new century, argued that: national income accounting gave prominence to the collection and classification of the facts of the [therefore, for economists it is necessary that they] first domestic economy, facts which could be arrayed establish concepts in a way that allows the introduction of measures, and from those measures discover laws, and understood in a Baconian fashion to allow from those laws work back to the hypothesis, then by theorizing to proceed. The work of Edward Denison means of analysis, deduce from the hypothesis a science and Moses Abramovitz would likewise appear with which reasons in a rigorously logical manner about ideal
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