The history of economic thought has traditionally focused on the work of individuals no longer living. Recently, however, historians have begun to use their tools of analysis on the work of contemporary economists.
New Economics and Its Writing compiles evidence of this shift, with thirteen essays by scholars interested in catalyzing conversation between contemporary economists and historians of economics.
This new focus requires new methods of analysis—historiographic strategies involving far greater archival resources, for instance, and often nontraditional resources, such as electronic records. Essays collected here address these changes and examine how this new emphasis on the work of living economists can and will entail interaction between the producer of theory and the historian, complicating the latter’s role. Chapters discuss topics such as the emergence of subdisciplines in economics, social-contextual perspectives on the writing of economics, the dynamics of idea development, and the recent incursion of noneconomic thinking—such as engineering methods and mathematical models—into economics.
New Economics and Its Writing shows that attention to recent, ongoing economics from historians of economics has the potential to revitalize and transform the history of economics as an area of investigation.
This volume is the 1997 Annual Supplement to the journal History of Political Economy. All 1997 subscribers will receive a copy of this book as part of their annual subscription.
Contributors. Timothy L. Alborn, Marcel Boumans, Joshua Cohen, John B. Davis, Ross B. Emmett, Paul Harrison, Daniel M. Hausman, Mary L. Hirschfeld, S. Todd Lowry, Steven G. Medema, Philip Mirowski, Philippe Mongin, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, Esther-Mirjam Sent
Philip Mirowski is a Koch Professor of Economics and the History of Science, Department of Economics at University of Notre Dame. He is the author of the following works: MACHINE DREAMS: ECONOMICS BECOMES A CYBORG SCIENCE (Cambridge, 2002); MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT: ECONOMICS AS SOCIAL PHYSICS, PHYSICS AS NATURE'S ECONOMICS (Cambridge, 1989); AGAINST MECHANISM: PROTECTING ECONOMICS FROM SCIENCE (Rowman and Littlefield, 1988); THE BIRTH OF THE BUSINESS CYCLE (Garland, 1985). His edited works include: (w/Esther Mirjam Sent) SCIENCE BOUGHT AND SOLD: ESSAYS IN THE ECONOMICS OF SCIENCE (Chicago, 2002); (w/Steven Tradewell) THE ECONOMIC WRITINGS OF WILLIAM THORNTON (Pickering & Chatto, 1999); EDGEWORTH ON CHANC, ECONOMIC HAZARD, AND STATISTICS (Rowman and Littlefield, 1994); NATURAL IMAGES IN ECONOMIC THOUGHT: "MARKETS READ IN TOOTH AND CLAW" (Cambridge, 1994); THE RECONSTRUCTON OF ECONOMIC THEORY (Kluwer Nijhoff, 1986).
