ABSTRACT
Blaug (1997, p. 1) warns us of two sorts of danger in evaluating the work of earlier writers: ‘on the one hand to see only their mistakes and defects without appreciating the limitations of both the analysis they inherited and of the histori- cal circumstances in which they wrote; and, on the other hand, to expand their merits in the eagerness to discover an idea in advance of their own times, and frequently of their own intentions’. Since we tend to be advocates for those we have uncovered, it is the second danger that faces the discoverer of neglect.
