ABSTRACT
I begin with a fundamental distinction between rational and historical reconstructions of past thinkers. By rational reconstruction I mean what Herbert Butterfield called the ‘Whig interpretation of history’: the tendency to view history as a relentless march of progress from past errors to present truths. Thus a rational reconstruction of, say, Adam Smith or David Ricardo treats their writings as if they were written now and had been submitted to the American Economic Review or the Journal of Political Economy; it appraises their ideas in our terms in order to confirm the belief that there has been progress in intellectual history. A historical reconstruction, on the other hand, attempts to recover the ideas of past thinkers in terms that they, and their contemporaries, would have recognised as a more or less faithful description of what they had set out to do; it tries to see the past as the past saw itself.
