Renewing historical approaches
For the current defenders of historical reconstructions, or of the writing of an intellectual, cultural and institutional history of economics, there is a commonly accepted presupposition: the uselessness of Whig history, or of historical narratives written for the purposes of justification, celebration and apology, through which the science is presented as a series of sustained advances, following an inexorable and cumulative march of progress towards the present.
The mere analytical reconstruction is subject to strong criticism, in so far as historians should be interested, above all, in the processes of human creation inherent in the production of scientific knowledge. In order to understand the relevance of modern concepts we need to trace back the process of development that produce them and this exercise implies a historical reconstruction of that process. Thus, instead of studying the history of some “thing” that they have always been able to clearly identify (prices, markets, products, capital, money, you name it), the historians of economic thought turn their attention to the study of the way in which that “thing”, without any permanent and transcendental identity, has been transformed into a historical object.This leads to a broader vision of the craft and skills of the historian of economic thought, in terms of hermeneutics, that is, the process, principles and methods of interpretation of the contemporary and historical meanings of economic writings (Emmett 2003; Faccarello 2014). This may imply a new way of dealing with textual exegesis of the published works of past economists, inviting emphasis on the importance of biographical evidence, the relevance of archival materials, the role of the wider philosophical and political contexts and their interference in setting the economist’s mind.
In this sense, the historian of economics penetrates into fields of interpretation that are also frequented by other historians of science: instruments, arguments, experiments, models, visual representations, laboratories, places of knowledge and power, laws and institutions.
Also, frequently, historians are led to momentarily forget the science with which they are dealing, in order to focus on the environments of inspiration and conspiracy that spur economists into action (Mirowski 2002).Such proximity in relation to the objects that are dealt with by the history of science in general certainly lay at the origin of the attempts to enlarge the community of scholars with whom historians of economics keep in company (Schabas 1992). The appeal for the inclusion of the history of economics within the analytical framework of the history of the social sciences with which economics is most closely engaged in dialogue (Backhouse and Fontaine 2010) is only one among a variety of different demonstrations of the permanent determination of the historians of economic thought to question the solidity of the very floor on which they stand.