In contrast to the reorientation of political economy implemented by Keynes with his General Theory less than seven years after the 1929 Wall Street crash, no substantial change in the mainstream approach to economics can be detected twelve years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The same Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model which had been unable to anticipate the crisis still rules research, teaching and economic policy, only marginally modified to take account of the most obvious flaws of the economic system. In this intellectual environment, going back to past authors may be of some help, not to fuel nostalgia for times gone by but to explore modern economic issues along new perspectives—in short to build theory and understand facts. This is the task of the history of economic thought, when it is not understood as a graveyard for respected albeit no longer read authors but as a living corpus of debates on the same old issues shrunk and distorted by the present mainstream.
This conception of political economy and its history has been applied by Annalisa Rosselli during her long and prolific academic life. The present volume in her honour bears testimony to her commitment, bringing together contributions by scholars who share it to some extent. It is no surprise that specific sections of the book are devoted to ‘big names’ who incarnate unconventional ways of thinking in political economy today: Ricardo, Keynes and Sraffa. Another section deals with the Old Classical tradition from Quesnay to Marx which gave centre stage to the relationship between the distribution of income and the accumulation of capital—an issue neglected in modern mainstream economics. And the volume opens up with a section on history of economic thought method and scope; it includes new perspectives in gender studies and illustration of the fecundity of the link with economic history.
Drawing on previous research by Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, a recent study empirically identified three trends in the evolution of the history of economic thought during the past 20 years: ‘1) a sort of “stepping down from the shoulders of giants”, namely a move towards studies of “minor” figures and/or economists from a more recent past; 2) the blossoming of archival research into unpublished work and correspondence; 3) less theory-laden investigations, connecting intellectual circles, linking characters and events’ (Marcuzzo and Zacchia 2016, p. 39). With this quantitative investigation, it has been possible to ‘demonstrate that there is some evidence to support these claims’ (ibid., p. 29). How does the present volume fit into these trends?
First, it is unquestionably an act of resistance against ‘stepping down from the shoulders of giants’. Of the ten ‘giants’ considered in the study by Marcuzzo and Zacchia (Smith, Ricardo, J.S. Mill, Marx, Walras, Marshall, Wicksell, Schumpeter, Keynes, Hayek), all except Wicksell and Hayek show up here. If we add to this list three other authors who can hardly be called ‘minor’ (Quesnay, Bentham, Sraffa), eleven of the eighteen chapters deal explicitly with their theories (with frequent overlapping). The winning trio is Ricardo–Keynes–Sraffa, each of them being considered in at least four chapters. Two reasons may account for this unconventional bias. As mentioned above, this volume brings together contributors who wished to express their respect for Annalisa Rosselli’s scholarly achievements. Obviously some sort of accord appears between the way she has practised history of economic thought and the selection of authors she has studied most. However, a deeper reason also underlies this bias: the common belief that going back to these ‘giants’ is not a sectarian ratiocination about ‘what they really said’ but a defence against the conceptual impoverishment of modern economics and a useful tool to open new paths to a broader understanding of present issues.
If the volume aims to resist one of the trends detected in the above-mentioned quantitative study, it nevertheless also illustrates the third trend detected there: the growing interest in the appraisal of intellectual circles and historical networks, seen from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Seven of the eighteen chapters explicitly adopt this method, and in doing so, they trace out new perspectives in various fields and subjects: the state of the history of economic thought in the economics discipline, gender studies, and political and intellectual history. More generally, nearly all the chapters in the volume bear out the importance of history in their way of doing history of economic thought. This is a distinctive aspect which calls for further examination.
1.1 History of Economic Thought and Economic History
Many chapters in the volume draw on the relationship between history of economic thought (HET) and economic history (EH). Working two-way, this relationship is not to be understood (as it all too often is) as mere historical contextualization of theory or, symmetrically, as a departure from theory in favour of history. Things are more complex.
In her presidential address to the 2012 annual conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, Annalisa Rosselli summarized the reconstruction of Ricardo’s theory of money she had put forward with Maria Cristina Marcuzzo (Marcuzzo and Rosselli 1991) and asked: ‘If this reconstruction of Ricardo’s monetary theory is correct, what is the contribution of EH to it? Could it be arrived at on textual evidence alone, or does a knowledge of the working of the economic system in Ricardo’s times constitute a significant contribution to it?’ (Rosselli 2013, p. 872). Her answer was that EH had been ‘the source of three major contributions to this reconstruction’ (ibid.): (1) factual knowledge of the working of the foreign bills of exchange market avoided the risk ‘to misinterpret the text’ (ibid.); (2) it threw some light on ‘the implicit assumptions of his [Ricardo’s] theory which reflect the behaviour of some of the agents involved’ (ibid., p. 873)—particularly the (inverse) causal relationship between the quantity of money and the exchange rate generated by the liquidity of the bullion traders; and (3) with a knowledge of the ancien régime monetary system—characterized by the duality of the unit of account and the means of exchange—we could appreciate the fact that ‘at the theoretical level it was Ricardo with his Ingot Plan who decreed the end of th[is] system’ (ibid., p. 877).
It will be observed that this type of approach to HET is both analytical, thanks to its careful attention to the texts (what did past authors say, was it original and consistent, and what link, if any, did it have with today’s economics?), and historical, thanks to its detailed study of the facts (how did the theories reflect and incorporate social relations, institutions and practical issues?). To simplify, we will call it a historical-analytical way of doing HET. It is not an easy way, because its specificity may fail to be recognized among historians of economic thought and among economists at large. This is due to two possible confusions which reinforce each other. Since it is concerned with economic analysis and often refers to issues also debated in modern theories, it is confused by some historians of economic thought with what is usually called a ‘Whig’ approach—one which evaluates past authors through the lens of present-day economics, considered as the scientific achievement of a long historical process. This assimilation neglects the fact that most of the advocates of the historical-analytical way of doing HET share a profound dissatisfaction with modern economics, if not a critique of it. This aspect leads to further confusion, this time not only on the part of some historians of economic thought but also of many other economists. This second confusion is with what is usually called ‘heterodox’ economics and it is all the more likely to be made since, reconstructing past theories in their own right, it often focuses on some ‘big names’ neglected or misrepresented by standard economics (e.g. Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes, Sraffa), and stresses the role of historically determined institutions in the working of the economy. Acknowledging the specificity of the historical-analytical way of doing HET thus requires dissipation of these two confusions.
1.2 Economic Analysis, but No ‘Whig’ History of Economic Thought
Addressing the History of Economics Society in 1987, Paul A. Samuelson declared: ‘I propose that history of economics more purposefully reorient itself toward studying the past from the standpoint of the present state of economic science. To use a pejorative word unpejoratively, I am suggesting Whig Economic History of Economic Analysis’ (Samuelson 1987, p. 52). He praised Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis as ‘an evident leading example’ (ibid., p. 56) and borrowed from history of science in general: ‘Remember that working scientists have some contempt for those historians and philosophers who regard efforts in the past that failed as being on a par with those that succeeded, success being measurable by latest-day scientific juries who want to utilize hindsight and ex post knowledge’ (ibid., pp. 52–53). HET should thus be a story of success, equated with the present state of economics, as the Whig politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay viewed the history of civilization as a progressive march towards nineteenth-century England. Whig HET may nevertheless take past failures into consideration, provided study of them contributes to scientific progress by preventing their being repeated. The following observation by Takashi Negishi (1992, p. 228) illustrates this view:
To develop our science in the right direction, I believe more theoretical resources should go into the study of the history of economics from the point of view of the current theory. This of course does not mean to cut or stretch a past theory into a Procrustean bed for the current theory. The history of our science should be used as a mirror in which the current theory reflects the knowledge of how it failed to succeed in the past. To learn from past theories does not impede the progress of our science. Progress often means, however, sacrificing something old. To make sure that we are going in the right direction, it is always necessary to see whether we have sacrificed something in error.
The presupposition that past theory ‘failed to succeed’ leads to using HET as a device to confirm that current theory is developing ‘in the right direction’, by making sure that it only ‘sacrificed something in error’.
By contrast, the historical-analytical way of doing HET does not presuppose that the shortcomings that may be found in past theories are necessarily errors but considers them as symptoms of difficulties which may also plag...