A Slender Trunk and Many Branches. The History of Economic Thought in Perspective, Past and Future

This paper looks at the styles and trends that have shaped the subject in the most recent years, but also peers into the past history to trace its roots and ancestry. Within the history-of-ideas approach which does not fall into the Whig fallacy (linear progress from error to truth) I detect two branches. The first is the search in the past for what has been lost and can no longer be found in modern theory; it is part of a programme to build an alternative economic theory and is in fact synonymous with doing non-mainstream economics. The second does not necessarily entail heterodox implications, and is mainly concerned with interpreting work in context. I argue that the current revival of Keynes and Keynesian economics is an interesting case of the “quest for alternative” branch in the history of ideas approach, which however does not make full use of scholarly investigation into Keynes’s writings and unpublished material, failing therefore to grasp Keynes’s message fully. My point is that the historians of economic thought have proved better equipped to appraise Keynes’s wide range of proposals and not to make do with simple-minded so-called Keynesian policy. I claim that the “exit” strategy from Economics and Departments of Economics, as envisaged by some eminent scholars, for the survival of the history of economic thought, may be shortsighted since our “voice” may still have an audience and hearing in the aftermath of the present disillusionment with mainstream economic theory.