Review of “Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945-89.” Annual Supplement to Volume 51 of History of Political Economy, edited by Till Düppe and Ivan Boldyrev

Review of “Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945-89.” Annual Supplement to Volume 51 of History of Political Economy, edited by Till Düppe and Ivan Boldyrev

A connected history of political economy in Asia and Europe, ca 1750–1914

The history of political-economic thought has been built up over the centuries with a uniform focus on European and North American thinkers. Intellectuals beyond the North Atlantic have been largely understood as the passive recipients of already formed economic categories and arguments. This view has often been accepted not only by scholars and observers in Europe but also in many other places such as Russia, India, China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire. In this regard, the articles included in this collection explicitly differentiate from this diffusionist approach (“born in Western Europe, then flowed everywhere else”).

Fifty Years of HOPE

Fifty years past A. W. Coats’s (1969) “Research Priorities in the History of Economics”—the first article in History of Political Economy (HOPE)—the opportunity arises to check how such priorities have changed over time. Drawing from the 3,084 documents published in HOPE volumes 1–50, this survey analyzes a series of elements within the HOPE literature set, and those related to the broader historiography of economics (i.e., including not only publications, but also conferences, workshops, the development of institutions, and several reactions to this research project). It uses bibliometrics and network analysis to produce a classification system arising from the reference lists in all articles published in HOPE’s regular issues (1–4): 1969–2018.

Political Economy and the Medici

Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practices used by Medici entrepreneurs were first theorized by Giovanni Botero and others as what would become an “Italian model” in political economy, a model that had a profoundly wide-ranging impact, and that puts the lie to the commonplace in the history of ideas that the Italian Renaissance, so precocious in other fields, was silent on the topic of political economy.

PIERO SRAFFA: UN ECONOMISTA SCONOSCIUTO?

This note outlines essential elements for reconstructing the intellectual route followed by Piero Sraffa on the basis of archival documents dating from the second half of the 1920s. These documents highlight Sraffa’s interest in Marx’s lack of success in linking his theoretical contribution to the reconstruction of its precedents in the history of political economy. Archival documents illustrate the formative phase of Sraffa’s scientific programme and show his intention to build a new theory starting from its premises in the history of economic analysis. Sraffa’s subsequent abandonment of the historical-analytical approach confirms Luigi Pasinetti’s view that Sraffa had to shelve an initial programme of great vastity and ambition to reduce it within feasible limits, of which his ‘equations’ are a characteristic feature.

Five Decades of HOPE

Newcomers to the history of economics are often exposed to several texts that try to define the subject, make a case for its usefulness, and present the various methods one can use to establish historical claims. Such pieces introduce a number of methodological divides, for instance the standard dichotomy between rational and historical reconstructions. Most of the time, authors of such pieces disclose their historiographic preferences and provide a rationale for them, pointing to the pitfalls of the methods they feel should be rejected. They may also address the issue of current economists’ lack of attention to their past, and accordingly offer their views on how historians of economics could strive to regain that lost attention or advocate the alternative strategy of addressing other audiences. These contributions, however, leave one question unaddressed: that of how history of economics has changed over time. My aim in this paper is to use the fiftieth anniversary of the History of Political Economy (HOPE) as an opportunity to reflect on that question. I survey articles published in HOPE in order to reconstruct historiographic changes. This paper has one central theme, which is that HOPE has always been more pluralistic than current members of the profession, who often see the journal as a stronghold for the historical reconstruction method, seem to acknowledge: while some individuals or groups of individuals have suggested bolder inflections for the field over the years, their attempts, while sparking debates and, at times, controversies, have had limited effect on a vast portion of the journal’s content, hinting at the inability to engage the larger community of historians of economics in adopting these new approaches.

Comment on William J. Novak: Institutional Economics and the Progressive Movement for the Social Control of American Business

William J. Novak's engaging historiography is at once a recovery project and a prolegomenon to a revised history of political economy. His article chronicles the achievements of Progressive Era institutional economists and critiques the way they have been obscured by the shadow of the Chicago School of economics. Why do the Progressives deserve to be recovered and remembered? According to Novak, it is because they “underwrote one of the more fundamental governmental revolutions in modern times” and created the foundations for the “social control of business” (pp. 676, 672).