The tall handsome guy made of clay is Adam Smith. The great Scot is being honoured with a statue placed across Edinburgh’s City Chambers. The unveiling was on July 4th by one Smith, first name Vernon, Nobel Laureate and apparently one of the private donors that paid for the monument.

Adam is not the first economist to be cast in stone or bronze on public display. If you figure Marx as an economist then there are plenty of those to go around. Other philosopher-economists also shyly populate London. Adam has been made as monument at the South Western University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China. So as history goes, this is remarkable as the first PUBLIC statue of ADAM SMITH.

I find it somewhat more peculiar that the statue comes soon after the Adam Smith twenty pound bill. It may be an outcome of political devolution, and less likely of Gordon Brown, that Smith is raised to the status of Scotland’s heritage away from the myths of bearded troglodytes wearing kilts. On the myths of scottish identity check the magnificient The Invention of Tradition.

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.

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.

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

Immersed in economists’ writings, correspondence and diaries (when he is lucky), the historian sometimes spends more time with his subjects than with his closest relatives. He gets acquainted with their more intimate thoughts, with every nook and cranny of their temper. And as befits a family story, he develops his own preferences. He can’t help being repelled by the self-confidence and egocentrism of a scholar, or seduced by the wit and humanity of another (and God knows how important the wit is for a woman…).

But what if, reading the story of an economist’s intellectual development, five colleagues display the same reaction: “what an unpleasant person!” What if the various biographies by family members and the numerous testimonies by former colleagues all emphasize egocentrism and self-confidence, so that the historian is left wondering whether they should be part of the history of his subject’s scholarly work? Would he be accused of lousy psychologism if he underlines their influence?

Does the historian’s personal appreciation of his subjects endanger the value of the story he is telling? And is the right criterion to judge the value of such biographical work “detachment” or something else?

Yesterday, I gave a lecture on the subject “History of Economic Thought and Economic Theory”. In thinking about their relation and in reflecting on the future of HET, I used this cartoon to illustrate what seems to be the current situation of our field:

(I’ve modified it slightly by adding the text “HET” in red).

Just sharing a funny cartoon…

Biotechnologies reshape our relation to “nature”. All sorts of living organisms are engineered and marketed, it is now almost trivial even to remark it. Yet, I am still struck when I meet the most banal form of genetically modified organisms. As the linked page shows, it is not just about a model-organism: the JAX laboratory highlights the “key features” of the commodity, informs you of its availability, provides technical support, all with a price tag. With sales in July?

The economic logic is so much intertwined with the biological material that I feel that the story of the commodification of living organisms, well studied in the history of biology (eg, here or here), might find a place in the history of economics as well.

Every six months or so, I find myself reading parts of Phil Mirowski’s Machine Dream…and a few –sometimes angry- reviews of the book. That’s the thing when someone is ambitious enough to write his version of postwar economic history as a whole. Whatever you research on in this period, you end up confronting some of his claims (from this book or his recent work on the Chicago School and the Mont Pelerin Society).

Most reviewers eventually address the same issue, namely the consistency of Mirowski’s collective history with the various individual histories they have produced (Boland’s review is characteristically titled “zoomed-in vs zoomed-out”). Sometimes relying on archival sources, they fault Mirowski for overestimating the influence of such funding body or military organization on the individuals they have worked on (or on themselves, see Binmore’s review), or for caricaturing them as laqueys of Von Neumann or Hayek. And yes, I confess being hurt by his rough picture of such and such character I’ve lived with for years, reading their articles, drafts, private correspondence, diaries and most intimate thoughts.

But is there any road from individual to collective history? Is there any positive counterpart to the word “caricature,” a way of selecting a few characteristics from each individual, some that would together account for the shape of economic science, without distorting individual pictures of these individuals? Or do those willing to write collective history start the other way round, from these global forces that inform, filter and possibly distort individuals’ intellectual development? And how are these forces to be selected, if not on the basis of individual cases? Is collective history essentially a puppet history?

HOPE’s 2007 conference on biography and autobiography brought the question to light, but provided no answer to my obsessive question:

Is the kind of individual history I’m trying to write of any help to fashion the big picture?

One can write a paper on economics disguised as history .

Can one write a historical paper, informing history, disguised as economics ?

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.