History matters
The historiographical genre labelled as historical reconstructions, which was also previously classified in this entry as externalist or relativist, is characterised by the great care and precision taken in contextualising the process of conceptual elaboration, through the subordination of the scientific postulates to a network of conditioning factors that are seemingly external to it.
What exactly are these conditioning factors?First, the economic context: the factors related to the nature of the material and economic life of the period under research. How do economists respond to the changing material reality? How do they respond to the pressing economic problems? This means that, in the process of theoretical production, it is the very reality that is observed that influences the scope and limits for the formation of abstract conceptual categories. Thus, for example, it may be argued with some consistency that the Ricardian theory of diminishing returns derived directly from the negative consequences of the Napoleonic wars on English agriculture, or that the Keynesian general theory could only be developed because of the Great Depression that generally affected the western economies in the first half of the 1930s. The acceptance that these or other examples have merited should not, however, delude us about the validity of their generalisation.
The fact that, as a heuristic principle, we accept the existence of a relationship between the economic theory of an author, school or period and the accompanying set of contemporary problems, situations or economic and institutional conjunctures cannot be allowed to result in the adoption of single and immutable principles of causality. Relativising the theoretical and analytical procedures does not, therefore, signify their mere subordination to a deterministic dynamic of a material or economic nature.
Other factors must necessarily also be taken into account.The theorisation of economic life is riddled with elements that we might describe, in an abbreviated form, as doctrinal. The work of theoretical production maintains close ties with the institutional and intellectual frameworks within which the scientist operates, so that the authors who pioneered the emergence and development of economics as a science were inevitably influenced by the general conception of the world and the society that they lived in, by the spirit of their time, that Zeitgeist that made them the transmitters of norms and values that prevailed at a given moment.
It was not only at the political and legal level, but also at the ethical, philosophical and even religious level, that “the worldly philosophers” (Heilbroner 1953) adopted a series of principles that would shape a doctrine that, in a certain way, came before the process of interpreting the real world. In turn, these same principles were indissociable from their application, which leads us to establish a no less indissociable relationship between economic theory and policy making. In this way, a doctrine is to be considered both as an intellectual scenario of valuation and appraisal and as a practical guide to action.
Seen from this historiographical perspective, the authors and their works are treated as more or less conscious members of a school, or a family, in which invisible but unbreakable bonds of sharing and complicity are forged. Throughout history, there have successively been distinct coherences whose boundaries are defined not by the scientific postulates that they establish (which are sometimes identical), but, above all, by the doctrinal principles that they obey and which they attempt to make real.
Faced with this panorama, there is one question that must inevitably be asked: does this research perspective not lead to an emptying of the analytical content of economics, and to the painting of a picture of theoretical precariousness?
In fact, the risk of such an occurrence is a quite considerable one, in so far as there is a tendency to emphasise the dependence of economic principles on the historicity of the material context and doctrinal motivations that lie at their origin.
This is a bias that results from the perspective that chooses the doctrines, ideas, institutions and economic processes as key study objects on the formation of economic reasoning. It should, however, be noted that the minimising of the conceptual apparatus may create an explanatory gap when an excessive relativism is applied to the study of the periods in which economics has acquired greater credibility as an established academic discipline.The studies grounded on this methodological genre have tended to abandon the great narratives in order to give greater emphasis to particular approaches to specific authors and periods. But the group of essays produced by authors such as Warren Samuels (1992a, 1992b), Donald Winch (1996, 2009), Bob Coats (1992) and Jean-Claude Perrot (1992) have afforded a broad coverage to this historiographical perspective, which, it must be stressed, was the predominant view during the phase of affirmation of the history of economic thought as an acceptable subject of curricular study.
Among the most decisive recent contributions to the revitalisation of this approach based on historical reconstructions, mention should also be made of the works that undertake a comparative analysis of experiences in the history of economic thought, namely, those that have studied the processes for the dissemination and assimilation of ideas in distinct national settings (Colander and Coats 1989; Cardoso 2003), sometimes focusing on major authors (Tribe and Mizuta 2002, Faccarello and Izumo 2014), and those who have studied the processes for the institutionalisation of scientific knowledge that are performed by scientific journals, associations and societies, university and secondary-school textbooks and parliamentary debates (Augello and Guidi 2001, 2005).