The Hes At Fifty: Identity Crisis And The Need For Pluralistic Historiographical Approaches

In what follows, I use stylized facts derived from my own professional career as a member of the History of Economics Society (HES) and the history of economics (HE) community to document and illustrate the changing context of the subdiscipline over the past three decades.1 In the 1990s, the subdiscipline was comprised of a number of national communities. Among the latter the North American community held a dominant position and was quite different from its continental European counterparts, the French and Italian in particular.2 Not only were its academic culture and environment much more competitive but they were also more open to non-disciplinary history of economics.3 Over the past two decades, however, the growing domination of the continental European community has created a new context in which the identity of the North American community in general and that of the HES in particular has become uncertain.