ABSTRACT
One of the important PAE arguments put forward by Raveaud in the March 2001 Newsletter (“Teaching economics through controversies”) is that economics should be taught in terms of controversies instead of as an agreed body of thought. In effect this means teaching the dynamic development of ideas over time, i.e. an historical approach, since controversies involve sequential developments. If theory is context-dependent then we can learn much, not only from controversies among contemporaries in different contexts, but also from controversies between economists working within different contexts in history. Controversies reveal a range of possible ways of theorizing about the economy, drawing out the different understandings of the subject matter, the different meanings attached to the same terms and the different methodologies employed. By getting a sense of the range of possibilities, students can develop the capacity for judgment necessary for deciding how best to develop theory to address future contexts.
