Note that this material has appeared in print, and Bunka-Shobo Hakubun-sha Publishing, Ltd., in conjunction with Cambridge University Press, is the copyright holder of record.
The activities of historians of economics are mostly misunderstood by economists, who generally think of the subdiscipline as concerned with the development or evolution of economic thought. The work of historians of economics is thus believed to be, for the most part, linked to the notion of progress, of the improvement of ideas, of the march of Reason itself through the years, decades, and centuries from Darkness to Light. This book presents an alternative to the Whig historiographic stance of such views of the history of economics.
I am, in this book, interested in exploring the implications of the idea that the history of economics is not given to the economist-reader by the "facts" of the matter, but that rather the history is a creation, a construction by the community of economists and historians who are concerned with first one, then another, local and contingent problem. The ideas of economists are not immutable, even as they are set out in words on a physical page written or printed in the past, for the ideas themselves are continuously recreated. That is, the ideas themselves change in the cascades of representations and rerepresentations of past work by members of the community of economist-readers who emphasize or deemphasize certain features of the past in their own work, and thus recreate that past by confronting its ideas, and constructions, in their own current works. This process never ends. It is one of the ways in which the stock of truthful propositions changes over time, and one of the ways in which we confer with the larger community of economist-scientists both long dead and yet unborn.
I recognize that the claim that even a theorem, or an empirical result, in economics has an historical component might appear to be nonsensical to those economists whose self-construction is that of a positivist/scientist in the realist tradition, but really little is at stake here. This book makes no epistemological claims whatsoever, nor do I stand foursquare, or shoulder to shoulder, or any other way, with any ontological position. When I assert that mine is no study in Methodology, I mean that quite assuredly, and thus I am comfortable giving permission to hearers and readers to construe what I have to say with any philosophical posit at all.
Neither is this a book of criticism of neoclassical economics, or mainstream economics. A view that contextualizes the history of a particular set of ideas and bits of economics, and recreates the contingencies of its multiple births and deaths is not a denigration of the ideas themselves. To say that an idea came from A via B is not to appraise the idea, but to historicize it. To say, for instance, that a bit of mathematics used in economics arose in the consideration of a particular problem in physics is to say nothing about its "value" in economics, and only a small something about its "nature and meaning".
It is a pleasure here to acknowledge, in this edition, the specific encouragement of Professor Takashi Negishi, whose 1962 survey paper stimulated my own interest in the topic of general equilibrium stability, and whose suggestions at an early stage in my writing this book were extremely helpful, and proved to be important for my argument. Additionally Professor Aiko Ikeo, whose visit at Duke University corresponded to the period in which the book was written, was insistent that several of my arguments were incoherent and needed revision. She was right, and they were revised. Finally in my translator, Professor Teruo Kojima, I have apparently found an enthusiast for my work. To these friends, and to my other friends and colleagues whose support has meant so much, I again say "thank you".
Last edited: December 14, 1995