A revised version of the will appear in Rivista di Storia Economica, which will be the copyright holder of record.

“Alternative Pasts: A Response to Musu and Donzelli”

By E. Roy Weintraub

Duke University

One of my reading pleasures is the “Letters to the Editor” columns in the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, where I enjoy finding those hysterical protests by authors about how reviewers have mangled, misunderstood, or otherwise destroyed the author’s great and important new book. There seems to be a sub-genre here, one that provides real amusement for outsiders. Aside from the humor-value though, I don’t see why general readers are or should be much interested in the author’s response to reviews. No author will ever accept any praise other or short of an award of the Nobel Prize. That said, Musu and Donzelli have written not reviews, but rather interesting comments in response to their reading my new book, and it may be helpful to develop some lines of thought that their remarks suggest to me.

As I described in both the prologue and final chapter of the book, the history of economics is a curious sub-discipline in that it remains, unlike the history of physics and the history of chemistry, firmly embedded within the academic discipline of economics. As a result, historians of economics live among economists, and are most frequently themselves trained as economists. There are very few trained historians who have a serious interest in the history of economics. Consequently, the audience for books and articles in the history of economics is shaped, not only by members of the sub discipline self-identified as historians of economics, but also by the interests of economists who are not historians. This is of some moment because economists and historians are not engaged in the same intellectual project.

For instance, Ignazio Musu is a fine applied economist, and shares with most working applied economists several linked perspectives on the activities that he and his colleagues engage in. Musu’s penultimate paragraph makes a point of agreeing with Samuelson’s (following Josiah Willard Gibbs) notion that mathematics is a language which can be useful in expressing propositions about an autonomous economic reality. This indeed is how applied economists think of what they are doing. The entire point of the book however was to call into question, both directly and indirectly, that particular perspective; my project in fact suggested how such a set of presumptions failed to provide a useful framework for historians to employ to reconstruct the past. “Useful” of course is a tricky word. What is useful and interesting to an applied economist is likely to be useless and uninteresting to a historian. But more importantly, and this I believe is the case here, the reverse is true. Musu does not look at the past as itself interesting, but rather appears to see it as a railway station onto which bad ideas were discarded as the economics-train proceeded on the railway track to the present, or as a perhaps interesting distant place where bad ideas got on the train. Historians think differently. Imagining a reconstructed past, and telling interesting stories about it, are often reasons enough to sustain an intellectual life as a historian. That Musu concentrates entirely, in his remarks, on the material I brought forward on the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie model is thus not very surprising, for it is that material that is most connected to a number of current projects in economic analysis.

Franco Donzelli’s comments arise from a different perspective, that of the historian of economics. Let me take up a three minor points first, for on those questions I can provide specific answers.

1. On the question of my agreement or disagreement with Mirowski’s arguments concerning the foundations of modern economic analysis in the rational mechanics and energetics of the mid 19^th century, my book indeed has little to say, because I begin my story much later. I do not deal with Walras and Jevons and Fisher, but rather, through my discussion of Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos, begin my account around 1900 to locate the particular concerns of the communities of mathematicians and economists, focusing initially on Cambridge. Contextualization is not causality, and historicizing is not explaining. For me, the question is whether Mirowski brought into play certain kinds of arguments and materials that contextualized and historicized that early work that we call the marginalist revolution. For me, it does, although that is not particularly relevant to my own project.
2. On the question Donzelli raises about Arrow-Debreu, and the Bourbaki program, I thought I clearly showed that Arrow was not trained as a Bourbakist, although those ideas were certainly familiar to him. Indeed Arrow’s own work in many areas of applied economics would certainly suggest that he and Gerard Debreu shared only some intellectual projects.
3. And finally, although I am flattered that Donzelli would wish me to undertake a book-length project on the history of game theory, I most respectfully must decline, having already done so. My 1992 (edited) book Towards a History of Game Theory set in motion a number of projects by those whom I gathered together, which have resulted now in Robert and Mary Ann Dimand’s A History of Game Theory, Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams and Robert Leonard’s forthcoming From Red Vienna to Santa Monica.

On the larger matter, the main concern that Donzelli brings forward is shaped by his remark “I feel perplexed about the pars construens of [Weintraub’s] reasoning . . . [It] does not follow that historians of economic ideas should confine themselves to a sort of minimalistic description of facts based on archive materials and other objective sources, aseptically abstaining from any judgment which might raise suspicions of undue interference with the natural course of events.” This leads Donzelli to express discomfiture that my argument denigrates any historical interest in the filiations of ideas, for I can be understood to be arguing that historians should ignore how “one can assert that a particular conceptual problem has been solved, or has been abandoned as an unsolvable within a specific theoretical system”.

This worries me. If I am reading Donzelli correctly, he appears to believe that there is a normative lesson that I am attempting to teach historians in this book. He seems to argue that I have a position on “how the history of economic ideas ought not to be written.” I think though that the issue is rather different. In arguing that I chose to write the history in the manner I did, I was by no means suggesting that this is the only way to write the history, or that it is the best way to write the history. In fact, I quite clearly wrote, in the book’s final paragraph, that there is no best way to write the history of 20^th century economics. There are only different ways, ways with particular strengths, with particular weaknesses, with particular tendencies, and with particular approaches to evidence, argument, narrative, and so on. That I wrote the history as an interweaving of the histories of the communities of mathematicians and economists is not a guide to how others should write the history of 20^th century economics. I of course argued that, associated with the different ways of writing economics are differences in the particular kinds of evidence employed, and that each particular approach almost predetermines the kind of narrative that can be developed. But this is not a judgment that those approaches I chose not to utilize are illegitimate. I am not Cleo, hurling instructions to historians from Olympus. I instead argued that I have an obligation in my historical writing to be clear, to employ evidence consistent with the historical community’s standards, and to accommodate myself to notions of acceptable historical practice. Beyond those obligations, I sought to illustrate, to entertain, and to engage the reader with a reconstructed past. In the end, it pleases me that readers Musu and Donzelli, for both of whom I have great respect, appear to have been engaged in that way by my book.