Was George Stigler Adam Smith's Best Friend? Studying the History of Economic Thought

At times economists seem to treat research into the history of their profession as a guilty pleasure, equating it with “the love that dares not speak its name,” to steal an expression from Oscar Wilde. As a field of research it retains at best an equivocal position. Should real economists waste their time amusing themselves with such a completely irrelevant and non-applicable field? This, at best, ambivalent attitude by a clear majority of the profession meant that the establishment of the first journal dedicated to this area of endeavor (History of Political Economy) served as the eagerly awaited signal for the most prestigious general journals to stop publishing articles of this nature. By the 1970s, the subject's relegation to the backwaters of the discipline translated into a generalized move to drop history of economic thought (as well as economic history) as a requirement of graduate education:the history of thought, like all other fields, is well enough served by its own specialists. These were the reasons why Stigler proposed and supported the decision of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago to abandon its history of thought requirement in 1972, before many other departments did (Rosen 1993, p. 811).