The question of progress in economic knowledge during its historical development has been thoroughly treated several times in the past by many eminent economists, historians of thought, and philosophers (Stigler 1965, 1983; Worswick 1972; Blaug 1985, 2000; Hausman 1989; Khalil 1995; Backhouse 1997). Although this tenacity in wondering about progress proves that it has a real importance, a growing number of economists suggest that it has no meaning, either because it is useless, or because it is too exigent for economics.

Most discussions of how one should write the history of economics are conducted at a very abstract level. They debate the merits of alternative approaches without relating them to specific problem-situations or specific periods. The literature uses terms such as “absolutism,” “relativism,” “Whig history,” “thick history,” “historical reconstructions,” “rational reconstructions,” and “presentism,” frequently arguing that one of these approaches is better than one or more of the others. In warning historians of economics against sin, they typically define sin in absolute terms. This is particularly true of those who argue for “relativism,” “thick history,” “historical reconstructions” and the like. There is a simple reason for this. Terms such as “absolutism,” “Whig history,” and “presentism” all carry negative connotations, with the result that their advocates usually feel impelled to qualify them. On the other hand, supporters of “historical reconstruction,” “thick history” and so on feel much less pressure to offer such qualifications—the words used have the sound of “real” history. The terminology itself is value-laden.

About three lines into his book Making Natural Knowledge, Jan Golinski defines the “constructivist” view of science as “that which regards scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature” (Golinski 1998, p. ix). Having a pretty good idea of what Professor Golinski's book was going to be about, this stopped me for a moment. Is that all there is to it? Is that what the work of the Strong Programme, Latour, Pickering, Knorr-Cetina; the talk of mangle, black boxes and resistances, is all about? Described this way, it seems quite reasonable; a way of thinking about scientific activity that should at least be given a hearing. Admittedly, I have seen other, usually more prolix, ways of characterizing what Golinski has called the constructivist view of science. But I like this one. It sends what I believe to be the correct message that this “constructivism” is, at its heart, better characterized as plausible and intriguing than outrageous, and that it is not necessarily threatening to any core values held by historians.

Eleven years ago, at my first HES conference, I attended a session on the historiography of economics. In my naiveté and brashness (not a good combination!) as a grad student, I asked why so much of the conversation about how to do historical work in economics was dominated by reference to methodological categories provided by philosophers of science like Lakatos, Popper, and Kuhn. I enjoyed my own investigations in the philosophy of economics, and was starting to write about Frank Knight, who was certainly not naive philosophically, but I wanted a different reference point as a historian of economics. I remember one member of the panel looking at me somewhat puzzled and asking, “Where else would you look?”

Today, we gather to reflect, once again, on the historiography of economics. This time, we are asked to reflect on a new reference point for our work: the sociology of scientific knowledge or science studies. Jan Golinski has provided us with an excellent survey of work in this field, and a synopsis of its relevance over the past fifteen years or so to the history of the natural sciences. His book is not a rallying cry for constructivism, but rather a careful analysis of the benefits and costs to historians of science if they choose to adopt constructivist techniques.

When I went through my graduate training in economics at Stanford University, I learned that economics consists of ideas. These are often expressed in mathematical terms and can be found in books and articles. To become a successful economist, you have to understand these ideas and come up with variations on them. So, during my first year of graduate studies, I spent the majority of my time working my way through the many books and articles assigned for my classes in microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. During their lectures, our instructors would walk us through any difficult mathematical manipulations that we encountered in our readings. Surely, I thought, I was on my way to becoming a respected economist. Still, I needed to specialize in a few fields, which I did in my second year.

While most scientists and philosophers of science privilege scientific knowledge, and have sought demarcations of science from non-science to justify the privilege, sociologists of science, small numbers of philosophers of science, anthropologists, and some scientists themselves have been attracted to a new way of talking about science. Prefigured by Ludwik Fleck (1935/1979) and Gaston Bachelard (1934/1984), nurtured by the controversies over Thomas Kuhn's work, and instantiated in the Edinburgh School's Strong Program, the naturalistic turn portrays science as a human activity, part of the woof and warp of culture itself. Yet curiously historians of science have been less involved in this recent reconceptualization of both science and scientific knowledge.