ABSTRACT
Over the course of the twentieth century, the relegation of history to the margins of economic theorizing did not dispel all doubts and concerns about the appropriate place of history in economics. Yet by the late nineteenth century an immersion in the details of economic history tended to characterize schools of economic thought whose assertion of the priority of the inductive in economics landed them outside the mainstream of economics. This was the case for both the German Historical School and the American Institutionalists, who emphasized the primacy of amassing historical data and examining customary, cultural practices. Meanwhile, critics of the Walrasian system such as Philip Mirowski and Roy Weintraub focused upon its inadequacies as either a wrongly conceived paradigm borrowed from nineteenth-century energetics or as the product of a possible, but hardly definitive, construction of economic knowledge as a discourse about dynamics.
