ABSTRACT

We are told that the attraction of the book was its methodology, which involves an emphasis on history, both economic history and the history of economic thought, and their interconnections. We therefore take this paper as a starting point for a discussion of the role of history in economics. There is a large and growing literature on the study of the history of economic thought (see e.g. the survey in Coats 2000), but little attention is paid to the more general issues of the role of history, such as economic history, in economics. It is the purpose of this chapter to look at some of the history of ideas on history in economics in this latter sense, focusing on British economic thought. This limited sampling of ideas reveals that, even among those who see history as important for economics, there are differences over what exactly is entailed. Just as Weintraub (1998) has argued that, because mathematics itself evolves, the question of whether or not economics should be mathematical is incomplete, so there may be a similar issue with respect to history and economics.