The Culture of Quantification and the History of Public Reason

It is an unusual and memorable privilege to address so international a gathering here in North Carolina on the Fourth of July. American nationalism in recent times has not been very broad-minded, and I'm envious of a society that can attract so many participants from all over the world. But the issue of cosmopolitanism and parochialism pertains to academic discipline as well as to nationality. Historians and economists do not always understand one another very well, and while economists are able to bring in bigger incomes and to maintain a higher public profile, historians maintain a certain authority in regard to scholarly writing about the past. Practitioners of history of economics have often been upbraided for failing to write “real” history, and I have been known to write in this vein. At least I am among those who have tried to persuade members of this society of the merits of history, history of science, and science studies as models for writing history of economics. At the same time I have been seduced by the fascination of this field to devote much of my own research to it, and in these efforts I have come to admire and to draw inspiration from what is distinctive in historical writing on economics, as well as what seems most familiar from the standpoint of the historical discipline.