ABSTRACT
In his inaugural lecture, presented at the University of Sydney in June 1981, Peter Groenewegen (1982a:14) emphasised the importance of history to students of economics, arguing that is was essential that economists be ‘historiate’ as well as numerate. Without theory there could be no science, but without history there would be no antidote to the over-abstraction otherwise likely to be associated with theory, and with equilibrium theory in particular. Groenewegen illustrated the significance of the struggle between ‘history’ and ‘equilibrium’ through an examination of the seminal works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Alfred Marshall. In an interpretation of Smith’s writing that diverged markedly from that of commentators such as Hollander (1973), Blaug (1964) and Samuelson (1977), Groenewegen concluded that Smith’s solution to the history versus equilibrium issue was to refrain from using the concept of equilibrium mechanically.1 Marx’s solution, most commended by Groenewegen, was to use mathematics and equilibrium analysis, but to offset the clearly understood limitations of this analysis with recourse to history and statistics.
