Fear and Loathing in the Archive

To get to the archives I went up down left and right on Harvard Yard but Pusey Library was nowhere to be found. I had walked over it several times not considering that the Library named after the twenty year President of Harvard, and the man who broke the Harvard Strike of 1969, was a bunker hidden from sight. Willingly I entered the dimly lit and cloistered space. Outside promised rain, already muggy and looking generally nasty.

I was not happy to be there. I had sent an email in advance, the no response made me unsure if I would be able to open a single box of the Leontief and Gershenkron papers. I was also severely jet lagged, and made myself awake by ingesting heavy quantities of overpriced coffee.

At the library door, I was barred by a rumpled hippie, beads and all that. He asked for my passport and filled in paperwork to allow me in. The irony was heavy on my stomach, or maybe it was the salmonella in the tomatoes. Pusey is staffed by freaks. They smile at you and ask if there is a big Visigoth influence in the racial make up of Portugal. You could do away with the ecstasy pills, the bunnies and the ostriches, if you got a job at Pusey.

The wizards of the history of economics say about archives:

“By painting a picture of life within the community of economists, such correspondence can help researchers to better understand the development of economic thought, the public and private motives of individuals, and the process of interaction within and across intellectual communities.” — Weintraub et al, JEL, Sep. 1998

On most days this is a good description of what to do with archives. I have heard a lot less credible stories: one history fiend once told me that he got no high from archives and would rather other people do it. The reasoning was that if some specialized, others could be forgiven the trip.

My gig is different. I search the archive for the craziness. My Magnum 44 eyes the turn of phrase. I am treking for the characters of my plot and the little story that gets missed in the written and proper record. It is the understanding I am looking for, but also the props for the staging. After all, history is storytelling.

Why Do Historians of Economics Hate Social Studies of Science?

This was the title of one of the plenary session held in the 2008 HES conference. At the bar were: Esther-Mariam Sent who explains that lots historians of economics hate SSK and that it was neither nice nor very clever. Tim Leonard who said something but I can remember what exactly. Ivan Moscati who talks about his disbelief in SSK and that it was being clever to do history of economic analysis and heterodox economics. Ross Emmet who made a case for the linguistic turn. Steve Medema who said that as an editor as well as a human being he believed in diversity in opinions. Although I am simplifying a lot (which is not nice for the participants), one could grasp that I was not impressed by the general tone of the interventions - as well as by most of the remarks made by the public. And because this post was inspired by a lunch discussion I had just after the session with Pedro and Floris, I would use Q&A to explain my point of view.

Why? Simply because I think that the real issue was not really put on the table.

What is the real issue, then? Historicity.

What do you mean by that? The bare fact that as an historian of economics, I am convinced that what is really important when speaking of my working method is history, not economics or social science.

What do you mean by that (again)? I mean that as an historian of economics, I am constructing historical narratives and that to construct (what I believe) meaningful narratives I sometime refer to the social constraints that exist on the actors of science/economics (social class,  culture, etc.) and other times I believe that it is necessary to refer the theoretical discussions the scientists actually had and take for granted that it is what matters.  In other words, as an historian of economics I do not love nor hate social studies of science or economic analysis, there are tools that I find sometimes useful and at other times irrelevant. When they are useful I certainly like them, but when I believe them not pertinent in my narrative, I dislike them.

So I suppose that you believed that this session was not pertinent? Exactly. I would go even further, I believe it was to some extent counter-productive. When listening to the interventions, I felt that most of us were simply recreating an old and uninstering debate about what is more important in the development of economics: the internal (history of economic analysis) of the external (SSK) factors? Let me ask you something: when you are writing a paper on the history of economic analysis, do you sincerely believe that your hand is guided only by your social/cultural background?

No I don’t. OK, now, on the other hand, don’t you believe that this social/cultural background of you has no bearing on the topics you have chosen or the perspective in which you consider them?

Yes I do. You have said all that there is to it, young blood.

You are right, let’s go do some papers of HISTORY of economics now, because this is what I need to get me a (good) position.

Toronto

Back from Toronto after an orgy of papers and sessions. First HES meeting I attended, it was a very good experience. I will try to make it next year.  Several researchers delivered their expected good papers: Judy Klein presenting the last chapter of her forthcoming book on the war-origins of economic analysis, or Tim Leonard on the nexus of social science / religion / evolutionary thinking in the late 19th century.

For me, the good surprise came from a young researcher: Jose Edwards on the relationship between economics and psychology. Among other things, he hinted that the divide in psychology between introspection and behaviorism had some echo among economists - who tried to devise a third way. I should read more of this stuff, because I am more and more convinced that psychology is a science acting as a go-between with many fields (eg, biology, management science, political science), a bit like statistics in some respect. It suggests that psychology would be a good starting point for whom is interested in drawing an integrated story of (social) science in the twentieth century.

Oh, and I have some pictures! Just follow the link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=46430&l=c6337&id=522296095

HISRECO 2008

This is an excerpt from a very revigorating conversation between five young scholars, on the 6th June 2008 in Lisbon, in a bar of the Alfama area.

Jean-Baptiste Fleury : Don’t you think it’s exciting to be standing at the turning point of a field, trying to set its future?

Tiago Mata : I’m sure there are some people in Harvard who are feeling the same way right now.

Jean-Bapstiste Fleury : Well, I wish I was in Harvard, then.

I look pretty

This is how our blog looks like as a graph.

What do the colors mean?
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Scientific poetry

Sometimes beauty is in the detail. In a fifty-page erudite exposition on Mathematics, Measurement, and Psychophysics Stanley Stevens characterizes Fechner, the inventor of psychophysics and in many ways Stevens’ opposite, thus: “Fechner, like his fellow mystic Pythagoras, advanced a science by trying to prove a theology.” So true, and yet so completely beside the point. Being a historian of economics leaves me less and less time to read novels and poetry, but sometimes it’s there, right where you least expect it.

Good news is news

Last week I gave a seminar at UC-San Diego’s Science Studies Colloquium Series. The subject was economics @ Business Week. My previous experience with talking to a science studies audience had been luke-warm, supportive but not enthusiastic.

At UCSD I was greeted with a well attended room. As I spoke, eyes were wide open (even my akward jokes worked). At the end I got a lively and useful Q&A. So, what’s the deal? Is it sunny Southern California that prepares the mind for the history of economics?

Science studies - UCSD is not a department but a subject unit joining sociologists, historians, communication scholars and philosophers. The setup trains the mind for diversity. Michael Bernstein, author of Perilous Progress, was writing about economics before becoming Dean. There are labor and economic sociologists at hand. Charles Thorpe is working on subjects related to neo-liberalism. The unit is headed by Steven Epstein, whose Impure Science is on my “favorites” reading list, and who has just published another award-winning book: Inclusion.
Whatever the explanation, it was well good.

Terence W. Hutchison, the History of Economic Thought and Me

I have just learned that Terence W. Hutchinson died last Friday. I have never met the man personally, but one of his books had a direct influence on my becoming an historian of economic thought. The book is Before Adam Smith: the emergence of political economy, Basic Blackwell, Oxford, 1988. Here is the story.

As many young lads aged 20 or something, I was kind of looking for something to do with myself. I had followed a course in history of economic thought at the University of Paris I and liked it. To integrate a master degree with a major in HET, I had to choose a subject for the final dissertation and read several books to look for an idea. I finally found it in Hutchison’s book (the subject was on Ferdinando Galiani and the French grain trade). Moreover, I loved the whole book and read it from cover to cover a couple of times.

Why was it that this book was and remains so important to me? First, there was the scope of the book. It was (and still is) probably the only book that offered a whole panomara on the pre-smithian period (1662-1776). Some would say that there is Schumpeter, well… Not really. Schumpeter’s Histoy of economic analysis is very much a personal compilation of opinions, of anecdotes, of bits of analysis on authors Schumpeter liked, but there is no main thread that unifies the book and the narration is quite chaotic. Going back to Hutchison, a second feature that attracted me in his book was that its narrative is very fluent: you had no break between context(s) (I prefer speaking of contexts rather than context) and content, you could drift easily from the personal details of one’s author life, to his role in matters of economic policy, to his findings in economic theory. This point is fundamental since most of traditional history of thought tend to dissociate the contexts (the personal life of economic writers, the economic facts, the economic institutions and policies of the time) from the content (theories). I always felt that it was simply wrong and that there were connections between these different histories and that each of them enlightened the others in a way (and it is our task as historian to find in which way). Needless to say, the profession has changed a lot since the publication of Hutchison’s book in 1988 and it may look a bit old-fashioned to someone trained in the SSK. Still, I think that it should be on top of the reading list of every graduate student who wants to work on pre-1776 social sciences.

Place

The idea of a blog came to Floris and Tiago, on June 8th 2007, at the Young Scholars’ dinner table. The event was the opening reception of the History of Economics Society Meetings at Mason Hall, George Mason University, USA.

The blog became a certainty 13 days later, at Restaurant Escale à Saïgon, Paris, France, during the History of Recent Economics Conference. Floris and Tiago were joined by Loïc.

What does this (nano) history tell us about place? Academics migrate with the seasons and dinner tables are sites of conspiracy.