To browse Academia. The Companion serves to elucidate the history of economic thought, address interpretive challenges, and highlight the contributions of various historians. It is divided into two parts: the first focuses on major historical topics while the second explores interpretive strategies and the evolving understanding of economic ideas and disciplines.
Through an analysis of historiography, it emphasizes the socially constructed nature of economic thought and the importance of acknowledging different research styles. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of research methods in the history of economic thought. In reviewing the "techniques" which are involved in the discipline, four broader categories are identified: a textual exegesis; b "rational reconstructions"; c "contextual analysis"; and d "historical narrative".
After examining these different styles of doing history of economic thought, the paper addresses the question of its appraisal, namely what is good history of economic thought. Moreover, it is argued that there is a distinction to be made between doing economics and doing history of economic thought. The latter requires the greatest possible respect for contexts and texts, both published and unpublished; the former entails constructing a theoretical framework that is in some respects freer, not bound by derivation, from the authors.
Finally, the paper draws upon Econlit records to assess what has been done in the subject in the last two decades in order to frame some considerations on how the past may impinge on the future. Economic history has always been quite a peculiar department both in the domain of history and that of economics; dealing with change, institutions, collective rationality, and conflicting strategies of economic agents, privileging descriptive and nonformal analytical tools, economic history remained for long outside the scope of formal neoclassical economics.
This chapter describes and discusses the story of the incorporation of economic history into the mainstream of economic theory through the cliometric revolution, a powerful intellectual movement emerging by the late fifties, which encapsulated this reconstruction of economic history from the point of view of marginalist price theory and the postulates of individual rationality; Meyer and Conrad were the major drivers of this radical vision, and challenged the 'old.
