ABSTRACT
The relation between economic theory and economic history has been a recurrent subject of exploration, debate, and uneasiness since the field of economic history. A historian's method is as individual a matter as a novelist's style. There is good reason for reserve on this subject, except insofar as seek to share each other's unique professional adventures and to listen occasionally, in a mood of interest tempered with skepticism, to such general reflections as each would draw from those adventures. Economic history is peculiarly associated with the problem approach in both senses. Thumbing through the files of journals or the listing of doctoral dissertations one can detect the series of fighting issues, arrayed in geological layers, out of which have evolved. Economic history was pushed into narrower and more technical areas by the debate over monetary and trade policy in the 1920's and by the concern of the 1930's with the cause and cure for the business cycle.
