ABSTRACT
The history of economic thought is produced through a variety of activities on the part of many individuals. Most historians of economic thought would agree that one consequence of this is that there are multiple viable accounts of most if not an of the theories, doctrines, and conceptual developments in that his tory. There may be a tendency for opinion on some subjects to settle over time, but most historians of thought would probably still say that the field has a pluralistic character, and that this guarantees that the history of economic thought as a whole will always be in astate of evolution. This image of the history of thought as evolving and multi-perspectival, however, is contrary to how many non-historians understand the field. Non-historians tend to think ofhistory of an kinds in terms of "facts," and this obscures the complexity involved in thinking about a history of ideas in particular. Thus non-historians are apt to believe that when it comes to what Adam Smith said that there must be a "truth" to the matter. Historians, in contrast, know from experience that they operate with both interpretive strategies and strategies of argument, and that these invariably mediate "truth." History of economic thought methodology, as a subfield of economic methodology, investigates the significance and character of these interpretive strategies and strategies of argument. Interpretive strategies may be said to concern the assumptions and presuppositions that historians bring to the subjects they investigate. ]oseph Schumpeter in a classic statement saw interpretive srrategies at work when analytic efforts are built upon a pre-analytic vision:
The first task is to verbalize the vision' or to conceptualize it in such a way that its elements take their places, with names attached to them that facilitate recognition and manipulation, in a more or less orderly schema or picture. But in doing so .,. we assemble further facts in addition to those perceived already, and learn to dis trust others that figured in the original vision ... [while] the very work of constructing the schema or picture will add further relations and concepts to, and in general also eliminate others from, the original stock.
