It is right and good that Professors Marco Guidi and Massimo Augello have chosen to honor our friend and colleague Bob Coats by putting together this symposium—first at the AISPE Summer School in Lucca and now here in the pages of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Bob Coats was a towering figure in the history of economics, a man who set new standards for scholarship and pushed the boundaries outward in new and important ways. His 1969 HOPE essay, “Research Priorities in the History of Economics,” reads like a précis of Bob's scholarly career. He showed us the way not just by prescription, but by example,Footnote 5 and he is among a small group of scholars—Warren Samuels and Donald Winch are two others—who deserve a great deal of credit for getting those working in the history of economics to see their subject as intellectual history, a turn of emphasis that was really the launching point for some of the most interesting of the present veins of scholarly inquiry into the history of economics and economic thought.
THE SCHOLAR AS PROPHET?
Coats's purpose in writing his essay on “Research Priorities” was to take stock of the field circa 1969—at the founding of its first specialist journal, History of Political Economy—and offer one man's assessment of some fruitful avenues for future research. The main points of the essay can be summarized thus:
(1) Coats pointed to the increased volume of published work in the history of economic thought, and this, he argued, suggested a measure of disciplinary health and vitality that belied the decline in course offerings in the subject.
(2) Coats suggested that there was a need for scholarship in the field to provide greater historical context—more “history of economic thought as intellectual history,” more asking of big questions about the origin and impact of ideas, and why.
(3) He encouraged historians of economics to study the development of “‘applied’ economics”—the evolution of data, techniques, and tools—in order to trace the growth of the economist's knowledge rather than simply of his theory.
(4) He saw the study of the relationship of economic thought to policy as a particularly fruitful avenue for future research. This, for Coats, included the propagation and dissemination of ideas and studies of recent (twentieth-century) economic thought.
(5) He advised historians of economics to analyze the sociology of the profession—including the relationship of economics to the natural sciences and the other social sciences—and the professionalization of the field, both for their own sake and because of their influence on economic ideas.
(6) He urged the preservation of archives, whose contents would allow for richer historical scholarship.
In laying out this set of “priorities,” Coats was trying neither to legislate nor predict. Yet, his essay was amazingly prescient. The present state of research in the field and the prospects for the future are very much the product of a field that has traveled the road that Coats suggested for it. Coats himself played no small part in this through his own research and the support that he lent to projects on the internationalization of economics in the post-WWII period and the role of economists in the policy-making process.
THE STATE OF PLAY
So, what does the history of economic thought look like today, and what does this portend for the future? From where I sit—as someone who has spent a decade serving as the editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET) and who spends a great deal of time at history of economic thought conferences in the United States and in Europe—several trends are discernible.
First, to get a sense for where things have gone since Coats penned his essay, let us consider the lead articles in several issues of the JHET published around the turn of the millennium. The September 2000 issue of JHET was led by an article by Malcolm Rutherford on the early history of institutionalism. The paper was not an analysis of institutional economics, but rather a multifaceted approach to analyzing what institutionalism meant in the 1920s, with reference to the building of professional networks, the exchange of ideas, and so on. The December 2000 issue had as its lead article Craufurd Goodwin's “Economic Man in the Garden of Eden,” a broader intellectual history piece that attempted to capture the way in which larger intellectual forces collide—here, by examining the impact of myth, working through social control, on the evolution of ideas. David Levy's study of the role played by racism in the work of eighteenth-century economic thinkers led the March 2001 issue of JHET. The September 2001 issue began with Paul Samuelson's highly mathematical illumination of a problem with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's theory of capital. Finally, the lead article for December 2001 was Roy Weintraub and Ted Gayer's piece on how Arrow and Debreu's existence proof became accepted among the community of economists.
Read in sequence, these articles reveal the amazing extent to which scholarship in the field reflects the priorities laid out by Coats. They also illustrate why it is (in some ways, at least) exciting to be the editor of a history of economic thought journal these days—the incredible diversity of work going on in the field, both in terms of topics covered and, perhaps especially, in terms of historiographic methods employed. Economics past and (nearly) present is being subjected to historical scrutiny. The history of theory is now complemented by studies of the development of the profession and of the tools of theoretical and quantitative analysis. Works informed by the perspectives of rational reconstruction, historical reconstruction, science studies, intellectual history, and biography—a number of them rich in archival content—cross my desk with regularity. This diversity of content and method serves to define what the history of economic thought is today.
Because our field is relatively small as compared to, say, labor economics, and because work in the field is published almost exclusively in specialist journals, the editor of a history of economic thought journal has the potential to play a much greater role in setting the tone and direction for the field, ultimately determining the success or failure of work in a profession dominated by the need to publish successfully. It was not so many decades ago when this job was relatively “easy”: there was an accepted paradigm for working within the field (in essence, the study of the texts) and what needed to be assessed was simply whether the work in question demonstrated some novel point about the great thinkers of the past and their works. Coats (Reference Coats1969, p. 11) believed that such history at times bordered on ancestor worship and could be greatly enriched by expanding the contents of our historiographic quiver. And indeed we have. The modern editor is thus besieged by works of multiple genres—genres often not acceptable to or at least frowned upon by many in the field. And there are as many resistant to the new ways of doing things as there are to the old. The use of pejoratives—e.g., “thick” versus “thin” histories—abounds, and the field seems at times at war with itself over the proper manner—as if there were such a thing—of doing its business. Some would have us “break away,” fleeing the unwelcome environs of the economics community to join forces with science studies, history of science, philosophy, and the like. Others recoil at such a suggestion, suggesting that its proponents “want to turn us into the literature department” and “emasculate us as economists.” These sentiments reflect a fractionation that once lay beneath the surface but is increasingly overt and public.Footnote 6 It is somewhat ironic that those groups which feel themselves disenfranchized often attempt to disenfranchise many within their own number and also seem to have the highest propensity toward fractionation and self-destruction.
When I wrote the editorial introduction to the first issue of JHET published under my editorship, I spoke of striving for catholicity and balance, and I remain convinced that this attitude—which also characterized Coat's approach to scholarship—is essential for the continued growth of our field. This does not mean that we should tolerate poor scholarship, and there can be no doubt that there is plenty of bad work being done in the field—as in all areas of economics. One scholar in the field, in sending to me his report on a paper I had asked him to referee, remarked that “bad history and bad economics never add up to good history of thought”—and there is no getting around this simple truth. But I assert that there is also much more good work being done than ever before, in absolute terms if not percentages. Some, but by no means all, of this quality increase owes to the plethora of new ways of doing the history of economics. What we need to guard ourselves against, though, is an overly rigid definition of what constitutes good history, a definition that rules out of bounds certain types of history not currently fashionable. Those who hold fast to traditional ways of doing things must come to recognize—and many have—that there is much to learn from those utilizing methods drawn from the history of science community.Footnote 7 Likewise, those who see great advances in the recent move toward a science-studies approach need to recognize that there is much to be learned from those who utilize more traditional but less currently fashionable approaches to studying the history of economics and economic thought. The wider is the currency of this notion, the richer will be our scholarship and the greater will be the benefits to the field as a whole.
Moving from historiography to subject matter, scholarship in the field looks very different than it did at the time of Coats's writing. Work on preclassical economics has waned significantly. Petty and the Physiocrats retain some interest, but beyond that there is not much on offer. Adam Smith remains a popular subject for analysis, but Malthus, Ricardo, Senior, and Mill are seldom heard from. Once we get to the 1870s, however, the situation changes. Jevons, the early Austrians, and Marshall remain, it seems, fruitful subjects for new discoveries. Institutionalism, various facets of Keynesianism, and turn-of-the-century monetary economics attract more than a bit of interest, although work on Keynes per se seems to be subsiding substantially after the deluge of the 1980s and 1990s. Post-WWII economic thought is clearly on the rise as a subject of study, particularly among young scholars in the field, as well as among the growing body of scholars who advocate for and practice a science-studies approach to the subject.
This shift in research interests toward more modern economic thought is undoubtedly the product of several forces, including a lack of training in the classics at the university level, the increasingly mathematical and formalistic nature of training in economics, which stimulates interest in the development of modern ideas and techniques, and the sheer volume of work that has already been done on economic thought up to the period of Keynes. The rise of the history of science as an approach to doing the history of economics may also provide a degree of insight into the waning interest in the early history of our discipline and the meteoric rise of interest in the study of the history of modern economics. For much of the early work in the discipline, the materials necessary to weave a science-studies–oriented story are lacking—not completely so, of course, as witnessed by the subject of the 2002 HOPE Conference, “Economics in the Age of Newton.” But I believe that a reasonable case can be made that the stuff of science studies—including information about scholarly communities, the paper trail of correspondence, etc. that illuminates so much of this work—is more readily available (and perhaps more amply present) for modern subjects. And regarding earlier periods, the interest in examining broader communities of inquiry and the perceived minimal returns associated with the more intensive cultivation of the canonical figures have come together to stimulate an increase in the attention given to studying the contributions of “non-giants” in the field—including popularizers.
THE CHALLENGES THAT LIE AHEAD
I have already argued that there is much good work going on in our field, and publication opportunities have expanded far beyond what Coats could have envisioned in 1969. Coats was writing for the first history of economic thought journal, and now there are at least a half-dozen such journals published in English alone. But is there enough quality scholarship to support this number of journals? We now find historians of economic thought publishing their work in journals specializing in intellectual history generally or in the history and sociology of science. Some of this is for reasons of audience, some for reasons of supposed status. We have also seen an explosion in scholarly activity devoted to writing for edited volumes, which turns out to be a mixed blessing. The publication opportunities in the history of economic thought afforded by publishers such as Routledge and Edward Elgar have been an important stimulus to work in the field. These publishers recognize the import of our subject and have been steadfast in providing publishing opportunities, both for established figures in the field and for young scholars attempting to carve out a professional identity. But at the same time, the avalanche of edited volumes has meant a substantial decrease in the per capita effort devoted to publication in scholarly journals. This presents potential difficulties both for the journals themselves and for the quality of scholarship in the field. The former, of course, is self-evident: journals see a smaller flow of manuscripts than they would otherwise, and since the heavy hitters in the field are constantly in demand to contribute to these volumes, the pinch would seem to be felt on the higher end of the quality spectrum. The latter problem arises from the lack of scholarly checks and balances in edited volumes. I would not wish to disparage these works (particularly as I have edited and contributed to a number of them myself), but the rigorous refereeing by subject-specific experts that one finds in the journals in the field is not nearly as prevalent for the edited volumes. I believe it is unambiguously true that the surest route to enhancing the strength of scholarship in the field is for more of the work to flow through scholarly journals—and that this point is of particular import for young scholars, who, on average, have the most to gain from submitting themselves to the fires of the refereeing process but who are too often seduced by the “quick-hit,” vita-building aspect of publishing in edited volumes.Footnote 8
A further challenge facing the field, and perhaps its largest one, from an internalist perspective, is developing a disciplinary identity. This has multiple aspects. One facet of our current identity involves the fighting of rear-guard battles to justify our existence. This is completely unproductive, given that no one is listening anyway. Besides, those who constantly feel compelled to justify their existence inherently seem to arouse suspicion as to the very justifiableness of that existence. But more importantly, the history of economic thought community needs to face up squarely to the question, “What are we, and what are we to be?” Are we to be historians of science? Intellectual historians? Economists? Are we to be all of these (and others), coexisting harmoniously (or not!)?
At the heart of the matter is whether we wish to celebrate diversity or instead prefer to impose on the work in our field the sort of homogeneity that so many among our numbers decry within the economics profession at large. Hiding under the cover of “good history” will only take us so far. All too often that is merely a fig leaf intended to cover a statement that translates as “history as I would do it.” Historians of economic thought are now as slaves to the fashions of their intellectual culture as their standard economist brethren and colleagues in other disciplines. Many of those who rebel against the very notion of progress in economics are quick to point to the supposed progress introduced in the history of economic thought by certain currently fashionable ways of doing history. We clearly have come some considerable distance since the scholars like Coats, Samuels, and Winch began to lead us away from the realm of rational reconstruction and toward that of intellectual history. Times change, and with them come fads, fashions, and fancies. The course of events weeds out wheat from chaff, fruitful from passing fancy—always imperfectly and often cyclically. Through all of this, we attempt to learn, build, and improve how it is that we go about our business. But just as the rise of science studies within our community has led to the attempt in some quarters to stamp out the menace of rational reconstruction, the tide will turn one day and those currently gaining ascendancy will find themselves on the run.
How does this relate to the issue of professional identity? The way we see ourselves profoundly affects that which we will become. While we cannot escape the fact that we are perpetually “becoming,” we can, if we wish, choose to be overtly self-conscious about this process and in doing so chart for ourselves one of the several professional identities available to us. It should be obvious by this point that if I am to argue normatively here, it will be for openness and inclusion—not for bad work, but for good work of whatever genre. I will neatly sidestep the question of what constitutes “good work,” but we all tend to know it when we see it. The question that we face is whether we are going to draw the boundaries of good work broadly or narrowly, whether we are going to attempt to impose from within a rigid, “like me,” definition or take the more difficult road of opening ourselves to the notion that important contributions—that is, contributions from which all of us can glean new insights into the history of economics—can flow from perspectives very different from our own. In his wonderful little book on methodology published roughly a quarter-century ago, Bruce Caldwell (Reference Caldwell1982) called his fellow economists to pluralism; historians of economics would do well to heed this advice.
Yet another issue confronting the future of our subject is that of narrowness. The younger generation, although quite healthy in numbers, is abjectly devoid of generalists in the field. The same sort of niche-building that pervades the rest of the profession seems to have become epidemic in our own field as well. As economists who believe in the division of labor, this may seem both right and good. But I do not see it that way. I will leave unanswered the question of why there are so few generalists these days, choosing instead to examine briefly the implications. From an editor's perspective, the paucity of generalists makes referee selection increasingly difficult. It gets progressively harder to find well-rounded classicists, to say nothing of suitable referees for papers invoking scholars as diverse as, say, Smith, Knut Wicksell, and Samuelson. But more importantly, the history of economic thought scholar whose depth of knowledge falls only within a relatively narrow band is only marginally above the “economist” who is generally ignorant of the discipline's history. The historian of economics who has mastered the details of various facets of post-WWII economic thought but has only a nodding acquaintance with what came before is as dangerous as an economic theorist with no knowledge of history or an applied econometrician with little theoretical training. One of the things that attracted me about the editorship of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought was that it would force me to expand the depth of my knowledge beyond the narrow areas that I had been mining in my research. Teaching a survey course in the history of economic thought does not accomplish this. It requires active reading and writing across our discipline, just as being a good specialist in public finance, labor, or econometrics requires an in-depth knowledge across those specialties.
BENEDICTIONFootnote 9
When Coats penned his essay on research priorities, he challenged those working on the history of economics to think in new ways about their field, to look not just at ideas and how they changed, but at the professional structures and tools of analysis that played a role in the genesis of ideas and their ultimate acceptance or rejection, the transmission of ideas across countries, the impact of economists and economic ideas on the policy-making process—in short, to do history in a broader frame. He encouraged young scholars in countless ways and created numerous publication opportunities for those interested in the various research initiatives he wanted to promote. In all of this, Coats pushed us to do better history and so to better understand the history of the discipline to which so many of us historians of economics are attached. And so we have. But Coats was also both catholic in tastes and pluralistic in outlook. The continued growth and development of scholarship in our field requires no less of the rest of us.
