ABSTRACT
My reactions to Margaret Schabas's stimulating and provocative chapter are disturbingly mixed. While I agree with a good many of her specific observations and assertions, and have some sympathy with the general thrust of her argument, the choice of cliometrics to exemplify certain general methodological and philosophical issues strikes me as doubly unfortunate — because cliometrics was a unique and essentially transitory episode in the development of economic history as an academic discipline and because Schabas's account of it is misleadingly selective.
