ABSTRACT
John Henry was the discussant for the first conference paper I ever presented. In 1981, early in my career, I delivered a paper entitled “The Amer ican Methodenstreit” at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society. I say “early in my career,” but in truth this was long before I had anything remotely resembling a career. John could not attend the conference, but he sent his comments to the session participants ahead of time, and they were read aloud by our panel chairman. I’m sure John knew that my paper was the work of a person in the formative stages of his intellectual life. His comments were encouraging though critical in spots, and the criticisms were constructive and gently phrased. My paper examined a heated debate that preoccupied Amer ican economists between 1880 and 1910, concerning the appropriate method of economic analysis-the question of whether economics was essentially a deductive or an inductive science. It is now difficult to see how this question could have been a matter of serious contention among economists, and one of my aims was to explain what underpinned the controversy. I argued that the dispute was in fact the surface manifestation of a more fundamental disagreement between economists who believed that the prestige and influence of their discipline were closely linked to its status as a field of scientific inquiry, and those who saw economics primarily as an instrument of progressive reform. The advocates of the first view eventually carried the day, and the social reformers were forced to moderate their sometimes evangelical rhetoric in order to preserve their professional respectability. On the methodological issue, a compromise was reached in which both deduction and induction were acknowledged to play indispensable roles in advancing economic understanding (see Mongiovi 1988). The paper touched upon economic methodology, on the tension between orthodoxy and dissent that has been a feature of economic discourse since the middle of the nineteenth century, and on the role that ideology plays in the formation of economic ideas-themes that run through John Henry’s many writings (see, for example, Henry 1983-1984, 1990, 1995a, 1995b, 2009).
