ABSTRACT
In the history of economic writing there are currently two different
approaches: the intellectual history approach (IH) and the history of
economic analysis approach (HEA). M. C. Waterman, surveying the
nineteenth century literature on Malthus, regarded these traditions –
as personified by Donald Winch (IH) and Samuel Hollander (HEA) – as
basically incommensurable and non-competing.1 Both approaches can be
used and are used for different purposes. However, although this might
seem to be a standpoint one can sympathise with, there are obviously
moments of interpretation where these approaches clash and compete with
each other. As we have seen, the IH tradition has been criticised for its
historicist pretensions: to demand that intellectual historians should try to
ignore the present and avoid using any terms not current in the period in
question is really asking too much. But of course trying to avoid
reconstructing what past writers on economic issues might have meant in
their own terms (the HEA approach) has its pitfalls too. A technical history
of the development of analysis in a particular field of economics can
certainly be of interest. However, if one attempts to discover the intellectual
origin of certain (to quote Arthur Lovejoy) ‘unit ideas’, their influence on
politics, and so on, as well as the subsequent development of economic
doctrines, some kind of IH approach must surely be followed.
