I defended my doctoral dissertation on stochastic stability of general equilibrium systems in Penn’s Applied Mathematics program in fall 1968. That year I began teaching math for economists, mathematical economics, microeconomics, and even econometrics at Rutgers College, where I remained for a couple of years before moving to Duke. At Rutgers I saw that graduate students took required courses in micro, macro, statistics, math, and econometrics, and there were electives in other fields like public finance and economic history. I didn’t know that there was any subdiscipline, or field, called the history of economic thought.

In writing my dissertation I had relied heavily on an excellent survey article on stability of equilibrium, by Takashi Negishi, that had been published in Econometrica. Negishi was a theorist, and he was writing about papers published in the past, so I assumed that his survey was good history since it brought current ideas and analyses into focus by tracing the development of those ideas. Such articles were in those years being published in solid mainstream journals like the Economic Journal, the Southern Economic Journal, and so on.

I also knew that my father lectured on what John Maynard Keynes really meant using Keynes’s General Theory, his single required text, in his graduate macro class at Penn in the 1960s. Scanning mainstream journals, I saw that there were some economists, elder statesmen as it were, who occasionally wrote about past economists and their theories: Martin Bronfenbrenner wrote on Karl Marx, George Stigler wrote on Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, Paul Samuelson wrote on everyone. These individuals had learned their own economics, and what was important for economists to know, in the 1930s. They self-identified as economists, not historians: the distinction made no sense at the time. They were comfortable employing arguments by canonical figures to make or support their own analyses and arguments. I thus assumed that any well-trained economist could teach a history of economic thought course to undergraduates in the same way the mathematics community believed that any mathematician could teach calculus and linear algebra.

When we teach economics students, we often say that it is not so much the specific concepts that we want to convey, but rather we want to teach students how to think like an economist. Just as a mathematician speaks of students working to increase their mathematical sophistication, economics teachers want to help the student become adept in thinking in a disciplinary-appropriate fashion. From my own education, I had no idea that there was a community of historians. I would not have said that there was a way to think like an historian. From my own history classes, I assumed that historians simply knew lots of historical stuff like dates, names, battles, kings, and the like. Since I could never keep straight who or why anyone was conquering Malta, I thought that historians mostly had to have great memories. In any event they certainly were not scientists.

Like most economists, I knew nothing about the History of Economics Society (HES). I knew that many pre-war trained economists, like my father, were having difficulty maintaining their own ways of doing economics in the face of the postwar transformation of the economics discipline.Footnote ¹ I knew that there was an Econometric Society because I was a member of it, just as I was a member of the American Economic Association (AEA), but these organizations were hardly welcoming. By the early 1970s it was getting more difficult to get any training in the history of economics (HE) as graduate programs began dropping the field.Footnote ² There were only a few places in North America that encouraged graduate students to study the history of economics. I knew that at the University of Pennsylvania the history of economic thought had once been part of the economics PhD graduate requirements, but by the 1960s Arthur Bloomfield was the only one offering the non-required course.

As I was beginning my career trying to find my place in an economics department, I began publishing in very mainstream journals. I was also trying to figure out how I might prepare myself to work on one or another unsolved problem in economic theory. I recognized that the microfoundations of macroeconomics was a contested theoretical puzzle. Following what I saw as standard practice, and to teach myself about the literature (absent knowledgeable colleagues), I began writing a survey. Since “macro” to me meant Keynes’s theory, and “micro” to me meant neoclassical analysis, I began teaching in both areas. Through the 1970s I taught a graduate seminar on Keynes’s theory and its development using the emerging Collected Writings volumes.Footnote ³

Mark Perlman, on a visit to Duke to give a lecture and to talk with his friends Martin Bronfenbrenner and Craufurd Goodwin, encouraged me to revise an early draft of my survey on microfoundations of macroeconomics and submit it to his AEA-sponsored Journal of Economic Literature (JEL). After its acceptance, he asked me to do an extended version of it for his Cambridge University Press book series called the Cambridge Surveys of Economic Literature. I was simply an economist writing about how a current literature in economics developed.

I was, though, beginning to obsess about how economists could appraise work in economics. That interest was shaped on the one hand by my having studied Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos as a member of a reading group (when I visited the University of Bristol in 1971–72), and on the other hand by my being close to the founders of the Post Keynesian community (my father, Paul Davidson, Jan Kregel, et al.). I then naturally began to ask questions about the development of the contemporary theories I was trying to appraise. This was how I was dealing with these matters in the 1970s. I was not in any way connected to the older men who had come together to start the History of Economics Society. They began holding meetings, but I was unaware of them.Footnote ⁴ Yet, as my own interest in appraisal grew, I came to believe that theories of appraisal of subject areas had to be preceded by detailed contextualized histories of those areas, and this led me to think more seriously about the history of modern general equilibrium theory as the gateway to the microfoundations problem.

I need to be very clear here that there were no such histories of modern economic theories, there were only surveys of those theories for researchers, like graduate students, to get their bearings in a current literature. Interest in a contextualized history of contemporary theories was alien to individuals who were creating the History of Economics Society. They had their own projects writing about long-gone individuals like David Ricardo, Marx, Smith, Keynes, Marshall, Léon Walras, Thorstein Veblen, and the two Mills, James and John Stuart. Although some of them were performing serious scholarship based on prodigious (often biographical) research, others were continuing to produce exegetical or interpretative essays on old books, much as English literature scholars pored over Paradise Lost or the Canterbury Tales. Still others produced narratives of how economic ideas, economic thought, had developed: how, for instance, did the idea of economic rent develop in the works of A, B, and C? Such scholars performed the history of economic thought as intellectual history. I was not yet able to distinguish between individuals who wrote primarily on canonical texts and individuals who were concerned with the development of economics as a disciple. I was thus ignorant of the work of my colleague Craufurd Goodwin, as well as that of scholars like Joseph Dorfman, A. W. “Bob” Coats, Warren Samuels, and William Barber.

Since the history of economic thought textbook chapters stopped before discussing economics in the post-World War Two period, there were no textbook end-of-chapter questions like “Discuss the effect of Haavelmo’s treatment of probability in structuring econometric arguments.” This was the mirror image of mainstream economics textbooks that by the 1970s reified the comment Phoebus Dhrymes once made to me: “There is no reason for any economist to read anything written before Samuelson’s Foundations.”

Put bluntly, in the 1970s there was no such subject area as the history of recent economics. The diminishing community of historians of economics was increasingly joined by heterodox economists who, too, were marginalized by the postwar neoclassical mainstream. As the mainstream insisted that economics was in fact a scientific discipline, heterodox economists rehashed and reinvigorated old arguments that economics was not and could never be a real science. They began to argue that philosophers of science supported their beliefs. That is, there was a turn to discussions of how philosophers of science understood the growth of scientific knowledge and how those ideas could be applied to the growth (or lack of growth) of modern economics. The focus of such work was whether contemporary theories were or were not progressive, whether they were or were not exemplars of good science. Philosophers of economics, now called “methodologists,” engaged with these matters, as did some historians of economics. Other self-identified historians mostly pushed criticisms of modern economic models.Footnote ⁵ Their papers argued that a particular dead (or old) economist (e.g., Veblen, Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Marx, Piero Sraffa, Michał Kalecki, etc.) worth a chapter in a history of thought textbook had been correct and modern economists were all wrong. This trope was fertilized by poor training in mathematics and statistics, and thus weak understanding of modern economic theory and econometrics. And since such history scholars could no longer publish in mainstream economics journals, new journals and societies proliferated under the banner “Pluralism Is a Good Thing.” This led the diminished history of economic thought community to welcome methodologists and heterodox economists. Certainly Marx was an historical figure, as was Keynes, as was Sraffa and (the undead) von Mises and Hayek. In this fashion heterodox economists who did economics along the lines developed by their (mostly) dead historical heroes self-identified as historians. They subsequently joined the History of Economics Society, and later the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, each of which quite welcomed them.

It wasn’t until I began to construct a history of modern general equilibrium theory around 1981–82 that I could say to myself that I was potentially interested in the history of economics.Footnote ⁶ The first time that I went to a meeting of the History of Economics Society was the 1982 meeting at Duke when Martin Bronfenbrenner was HES president, and he suggested that I present some of the material I was then developing. I scanned the published program to see about attending other sessions, and I recall being rather nonplussed at how few sessions were even remotely connected to postwar economics. I was also startled at the number of socially maladroit individuals who would stand up in various sessions and make speeches about why modern economics was all wrong, and why their own theory of XYZ did not receive the recognition it so obviously deserved. Many of the sessions were given over to long-dead X’s Theory of Y, or X as a neglected Precursor of Z. I don’t recall very many individuals my age or younger, and out of maybe 100 individuals present there may have been one or two women. It was certainly not like any Econometric Society meeting I had ever attended.

One of the reasons for such weird “contributions,” or what I was coming to think of as non-historical histories, was that there was a deliberate HES policy to accept all submitted conference papers (see Davis Reference Davis and Weintraub2002), a policy that seems still to be in effect. Since most of the society’s North American members were at non-research universities and small colleges, they had no research budgets. Instead, these teachers had to justify their fees and expenses for attending HES to their dean or department chair. Approval of their request then was based on their participation—they had to present a paper or serve as an HES officer. Giving a paper meant receiving travel and lodging reimbursement. A healthy HES meeting needed lots of fee-paying attendees, so the number of papers submitted equaled the number of papers accepted. This was a far cry from usual practice for scientific conferences: a paper arguing that the physical world was created by God in 4004 BC would not be accepted for presentation at a twentieth-century geology conference. And when unrefereed papers from the HES conference began populating the pages of the HES Bulletin at the editor’s discretion, that journal published some extremely weak papers.

One of the features of this quality unevenness can be traced to academic tastes developed in undergraduate courses in the history of economic thought. Such survey courses were structured like English literature survey courses of the “From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf” variety. Textbooks might begin with the Greeks, then amble thorough the Scholastics, the Physiocrats, then on to Smith, Thomas Malthus, Ricardo, et al. The mind-numbing article genre of “What economist X really said about topic Y” has its roots in such pedagogy. Longer undergraduate student essays, honors papers, and even master’s theses were structured as recapitulations, exclusively based on the secondary literature, of what older economists and historians A, B, C, and so on had said about what X said about Y. They were rational, not historical, reconstructions. They concerned ideas, not people. They were interpretations and reinterpretations of passages from canonical texts: it was exegesis all the way down. Much of the published history of thought literature followed this rubric of the undergraduate syllabi.

I still did not think of myself as an historian. In those days I considered myself to be an economic theorist who was additionally interested in methodology, and I published articles in both areas (e.g., in volume 1, number 1, of the journal Economics and Philosophy). It was several years before I attended another HES meeting, in Boston in 1987.Footnote ⁷ I did attend the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Pittsburgh in 1986 and the History of Science Society meeting in Raleigh in 1987. In those years I formed friendships with several individuals, particularly Mary Morgan, Ted Porter, Deirdre McCloskey, and Margaret Schabas, whose work I had come to admire.

By the late 1980s I began to lose confidence that methodology, and a focus on appraising economic analyses, could help me understand the development of those analyses. I also became allergic to the methodologists’ facile assumption that “better” methodology would produce “better” economics. I came to believe that the actual history was obscured by the methodological presuppositions. This realization led me to the science studies literature, and I turned more consciously to historical reconstruction, and thick contextualization, of economic theories.Footnote ⁸ Following a fellowship year’s residency (1988–89) at the National Humanities Center, I began to think of myself more as an historian and less as an economist.

By the end of the 1980s I began to attend HES meetings more frequently, since some members of the HES community were getting interested in what I was trying to do, and I thought that by going to HES I could interest even more members of that community. I talked extensively with Don Patinkin about narrative strategies at the HES meeting in Richmond in 1989 as well as with Phil Mirowski about what we each were trying to work through at that time, pushing hard to contextualize how neoclassical economic theory developed in the postwar period. Some similar work was being done in Rome by Giorgio Israel and Bruna Ingrao. I began to hope that under the large HES umbrella, there was some room for me. And this led naturally to stronger engagement with that community as I attended HES meetings regularly from 1992 through 2016. In time I served as an executive committee member, and eventually an officer, of HES in the early 2000s, and I tried to open HES to both historians of science and science studies scholars.

I was unsuccessful in that effort. Meetings still were primarily constructed around sessions on individual past figures, since the presidents-elect could hardly find participants otherwise. Over those years HES as an organization concerned itself almost exclusively with putting on the annual meeting and hoping that the Journal of the History of Economic Thought was running on time. Providing grants to young scholars doing the same kind of work as their mentors was not any way to produce more research-rich histories. HES’s scholarly values were displayed in the prizes awarded by its several committees. But what can be inferred about a society’s self-understanding as it honored non-historians George L. S. Shackle, Edward A. G. Robinson, Israel Kirzner, and Geoff Harcourt as Distinguished Fellows? As a history society, but unlike the American Historical Association, it stood mute on intellectual controversies and historiography. The HES community through the society systematically ignored entire areas of scholarly work that were being produced outside that community and that could have been of interest to members of the community.

Even worse, HES as an organization maintained a view that historians of economics were economists. It ignored the marginalization of the HE community within the larger community of economists. Its members continued to argue that if economists only knew more history, they would be better economists, a view repudiated by mainstream economists. Replying “a pox on mainstream economists” was not helpful as faculty positions in North America and the UK continued to be lost and graduate students in economics with historical interests were discouraged, if not actively rebuked, by their economics teachers.Footnote ⁹ The closing of history of economics programs at the University of Notre Dame, Michigan State University, the University of Toronto, and the University of Amsterdam produced no response from HES. The HES band played on.

Following Neil De Marchi’s and my retirements in 2016, and Goodwin’s death in 2017, I’ve not been involved in HES. Thus, to contribute to this fiftieth anniversary, I looked back over my Reference Weintraub2002b edited HOPE (History of Political Economy) conference volume The Future of the History of Economics, and its expression of my then pessimism about HES’s intellectual health. Today there are only a few arguments I would revise. Yes, the subdiscipline is now more gender-diverse, and more international in its scope and membership, but the difficulties economists have in writing, and writing about, history remain. While the collapse of institutional support for training in the history of economics continues in North America, support for feminist scholars recovering contributions of women economists of the past appears to be robust. This literature, though, has often been shaped as a critique of an economics profession in which only men’s voices were heard and men’s writings were studied. But feminist economics is not history. There is still no widely shared understanding that one can write well about the history of modern economics without denigrating its corpus.

While North America and the Antipodes remain nearly history-free, that is not entirely the case in Europe and South America. Despite numerous national “Research Assessment” resource allocation schemes, a few younger HE scholars have managed to at least begin scholarly careers. While few so far have found long-term or permanent academic appointments in economics or history departments, some have joined interdisciplinary programs.

Unlike what I saw in 2002, today there might be some alternative paths for a subdiscipline drowning in the strait between the islands of Critique and Interpretation. A small group of European and American historians has contextualized postwar economics as one discipline among the several social sciences and recognizes that writing history requires a sensibility apart from “thinking like an economist.” Those new historians of economics are connected to several younger historians and philosophers of the social sciences who themselves are in history or philosophy departments or interdisciplinary academic programs. Such individuals were trained in historical research methods in scholarly cultures that assume that writing the history of contemporary economics is a craft that can be taught.Footnote ¹⁰ The result is the emergence of new historiographic approaches involving social network analysis, prosopography, oral history, witness seminars, and exploration of syllabi and textbooks, artifacts, popular histories, and narrative strategies. The intellectual and socialization processes that help shape a disciplinary ethos in the philosophy of science, the sociology of science, history of science and history proper, and science and technology studies frequently produce complex, interesting, and thick histories. These historiographic developments, though, have not always led to interesting historical narratives, and neither does any particular technique pique the interest of oblivious economists.

Economics was becoming a mathematical science in the 1940s. Trygve Haavelmo, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Paul Samuelson, Jan Tinbergen, Lawrence Klein, and others helped redefine economics. That was eighty years ago. Historians of economics were not participants in that postwar stabilization of economic evidence and argument. Fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society was created to support the work and teaching of those historians of economics. And now fifty years later the activities of economics and historians of economics have become nearly incomprehensible, one to the other. It is long past time for HES to reconsider its place in the present intellectual universe. It is long past that time for HES as it is presently organized to reconsider its purpose and alternative futures. For as Keynes once wrote: