ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Chasing the B: A Bibliographic Account of Economics' Relation to its Past, 1991-2011
Author: Duarte Pedro, Giraud Yann
The increasing marginalization of the history of economic thought (HET) as a field of economics has been widely acknowledged by historians who have reflected on the current state and future of their discipline. However, most of these accounts are prescriptive, often adopting a firm stance toward the definition and proper methodology of HET. In contrast, our paper proposes a descriptive account of HET, focusing not on what HET should be but on what has been published in top economics journals. To avoid definitional issues over HET and to focus specifically on relationship between HET and its mother discipline, we explore historical pieces published in eight major economics journals, using the B category of the JEL classification to retrieve and analyze the relevant literature. By doing so, we focus not on HET in general but, in a much narrower way, on the kind of HET which is specifically intended for an audience of economists. We show that, though contributions to HET are still found in top economics journals, the rate of publication of such papers has become increasingly uneven and the methods and narrative styles they adopt are increasingly remote from that advocated in the sub-disciplinary literature. In particular, we show that the widespread idea that historians should address current economists by using their (mostly mathematical) tools and techniques is hardly present in mainstream journals.
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