Methodological Distinctions
There are various ways in which interest has been shown in researching into the possible forms for understanding economic mechanisms and problems from a historical perspective. The history of economic ideas and doctrines, the history of analysis and theory, the intellectual history of economics, the history of economic thought or economics, as well as the history of types of economic thought - these are just some of the possible combinations that obviously also reflect different ways of approaching the subject.
However, these multiple varieties of interpretation are conventionally grouped together under two fundamental categories: on the one hand, there is a type of approach that can be described, in a more simplified form as internalist (or absolutist) in that it gives privilege to the repetitive process of creating a conceptual apparatus that is considered, above all, in terms of its formal internal logic; on the other hand, there is an externalist (or relativist) type of approach in which all the emphasis is laid on the external factors that condition the formulation of concepts.Initially popularised by Mark Blaug (1962: 1-9), this division of methodological fields was later to be further enriched by the same author (Blaug 1990, 2001), through the application to the history of economics of a classification based on the scheme developed by Richard Rorty (1984) for the history of philosophy. According to the Rorty-Blaug scheme of things, there are four types of approach to be considered: (1) Geistesgeschichte, or histories of the spirit of a time; (2) historical reconstructions; (3) rational reconstructions; and (4) doxographies.
Under such a scheme, the extreme types are explicitly devalued, since it does not seem possible to accept a history of economics that is constructed solely on the basis of the themes or problems that have shown themselves to be central to the reflections undertaken by the economists from the past (Geistesgeschichte), nor even a mere composition of hymns of praise in which the texts and authors of the past are judged through the narrow filter of the current state of economics (doxographies). In this way, we can associate the operative notion of rational reconstruction with the internalistabsolutist methodological approach, and the notion of historical reconstruction with the externalist-relativist approach.
This binary opposition is necessarily reductionist and the distinction between methods of approaching the discipline does not fit into such a rigid divide (Klaes 2003). It is also worth stressing that within that dichotomous classification it is often difficult to decide to which of the categories belongs the same author (Davis 2013). Despite this caveat I think that for the sake of pedagogy these two great methodological sub-divisions may serve as a means to grasp the main practices developed by historians of economic thought.