In Search of a Study Object

Those who engage in the study of a discipline are heirs to an accumulated knowledge whose origins cannot always be precisely identified. In the specific case under considera­tion here, those studying the history of economic thought, or the history of economics, know that the territory within which they operate has already been ploughed and fur­rowed by a wide range of different authors and that the history of the discipline is itself frequently confused with the very discipline whose history they seek to discover.

A first observation to be made is that, ever since the mid-eighteenth century, the authors usually credited as contributors to the foundation of modern political economy have themselves been subject to the attention of their contemporaries, making it possible to systematise, debate and criticise the theses that they have defended. It is widely known that the French Physiocrats wrote their own history (Dupont de Nemours 1768), thus recording what they understood to be the crucial moments of innovation introduced by Franςois Quesnay and his followers. Equally well known are the references made by Adam Smith to the mercantile system and the physiocratic school in several chapters of book IV of The Wealth of Nations, explaining and criticising the approaches that his new system of political economy sought to supersede (Smith 1776), or the mentions made by Jean-Baptiste Say to different European approaches to economic issues in the prelimi­nary remarks of his Traite (Say 1803). These examples, relating to the historical period during which political economy allegedly established itself as an autonomous science, represent a kind of prophecy of what would become an almost permanent attention to the history of the ways of thinking about and interpreting economic problems and phenomena. This is a history that pays homage, selects its own authoritative sources and questions views which are considered antiquated.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, at a time when the basic features of the classical tradition of political economy had already been established and consolidated, the historical overviews produced by J.A. Blanqui (1837-38), A. Villeneuve-Bargemont (1841) and J. R. McCulloch (1826, 1845) clearly showed the relationship that existed between the systematisation of concepts and instruments of analysis (which had merited greater attention in other works that they had written) and the efforts that they were making to arrive at a historical understanding of the processes involved in the emer­gence and progress of a science under construction. Or, in other words, the history of political economy was understood as an integral and explanatory part of the discipline’s analytical content.

The authors mentioned above amount to nothing more than a few deliberately brief and early examples designed to illustrate a basic point. In a certain sense, it would not be inappropriate to consider that all the authors whose work has served as a pretext for producing the history of the science that they successfully attempted to cultivate also ended up themselves writing the history of that same science of which they were momen­tarily interpreters, even though this was not a priority in their plans. Also, in almost all of them, we can note the construction of causal views of the history of economic thought with the intention of being simultaneously critical and explanatory, thereby hoping to create for themselves an opportunity to subvert the prevailing orthodoxy and point out bright new paths for the future.

This does not mean that economics is a science that is condemned to permanently struggle with the tangled web of its own roots, even though the identification of our roots is generally a starting point for gaining a better knowledge of ourselves. The most scepti­cal will say that, over the past few decades, there have been no profound changes in the theoretical framework and analytical apparatus that economists have at their disposal.

For all of these reasons, it is easy to understand that researching into the history of economic thought does not represent a useless pastime, a mere ritual of digging up authors from the past in order to make them our accomplices in the present. There is, however, a terrible danger, of which all apprentice historians are aware, even if they have not always fully assimilated it, and this consists in transposing into the present more or less lucid views that were built on a historical reality that meanwhile has completely changed. When we say that present-day economic thought is largely derived from the past - or that the ways how economics developed and changed over time is a path­dependent process - we must guard against the mistake of interpreting such a claim as an invitation to blindly adopt rules and panaceas that have since lost any real support and foundation. The feeling that history repeats itself is always illusory, so that it is funda­mental to recognise the existence of new problems that call for renewed solutions.

Not only is this warning important, but it does, in itself, have a meaning that could arouse certain attitudes of scorn towards those who write or study the history of eco­nomic thought. Doing it is not a symptom of some nostalgic yearning for the past, but, on the contrary, is a means of making the answers that the present requires from us better grounded and more understandable. Also, if the science in question has its object of study firmly situated within the sphere of human and social action, as is the case with economics, then there is all the more reason for the knowledge of its history to be consid­ered even more urgent and essential; because those who have constructed it were respon­sible for leading movements of scientific divergence and discord, allowing themselves to be guided by convictions and beliefs, and being seduced by processes of change and reform, so that they cannot therefore be summarily judged on the basis of an abstract criterion of scientific validation.

Writing the history of economic thought is therefore a task that we consider to be indispensable, not so that we can make a positivist application to the present of the magical solution that history teaches us, but in order to discover the teachings that help us to re-encounter both the roots and the horizons of the world in which we now live.

What has just been said here about the history of economic thought may be similarly applied to other historiographical domains. It is therefore important to examine these remarks in greater depth and detail, and to clarify to what extent this interest aroused by the discipline is materialised in different methodological approaches.