The End of History (of Ideas)? And Why Philosophy & Economics is not History of Economics
As an economist who has been trained with some sensibility to historical aspects of the discipline (my PhD supervisor was a historian of economics, though my PhD thesis was not history of economic thought properly speaking), I’m totally used to the folk view entertained by most of my colleagues that studying the history of economics is useless. This widespread attitude has a very concrete manifestation: it is now exceptional to find a non-optional history of economics class in standard economic curricula. The argument about the dispensability of history for teaching the discipline also has its version on the research side. The history of economic thought is an increasingly marginalized field. A meaningful sign of this marginalization is that the members of this fairly closed community essentially refer to themselves as “historians” rather than “economists”. While they may have interactions with scholars in related historical fields or some philosophers of science, they have few if any with economists.
Things are apparently different in philosophy. For various reasons, the discipline is more friendly to historical perspectives and approaches. This is true regarding teaching. As far as I can tell, many classes in a standard philosophy bachelor adopt a historical approach, even when the class is not about the history of philosophy as such. On the research side, while there are specialized journals on the history of the field, this domain does not seem to be marginalized from the rest of the discipline. And more significantly, historical approaches and perspectives are pervasive in non-historical work on “objects” such as ethics, the philosophy of mind, or epistemology.
We may wonder about the reasons for this difference and if they are justified. A recent provocative paper by the philosopher Hanno Sauer makes several suggestions about the former and defends a definitely negative answer about the latter.[1] Sauer’s main points sustaining his negative answer can be summarized as follows:
1. Great historical philosophers were probably wrong about almost everything as they didn’t have access to the best scientific theories and evidence, and couldn’t benefit from decades, centuries, or even millennia of philosophical insights.
2. Great historical philosophers held many (moral) prejudices, which signal that their views should be downplayed.
3. Basic statistical reasoning suggests that the distribution of philosophical insights of relevance cannot be so skewed toward the past.
4. This is even more true that there are solid reasons to think that great historical philosophers were less good at philosophizing than contemporary philosophers.
Each point is relevant but I think that the first is already close to delivering the fatal blow:
“Take problem X. Problem X is important and difficult. Now the question becomes a social epistemological one: how much testimonial weight should we assign to the opinion of a person regarding a difficult but important matter about which we know that they did not have the required empirical or scientific knowledge to arrive at a minimally competent and well-informed opinion about X and about which we know that they had no familiarity – none, whatsoever – with the recent scholarly and scientific debate X? The answer seems clear: no weight at all.” (p. 12).
To be clear, the argument is not that historical work has no value. It is rather that the historical approach to contemporary philosophical problems, which consists in relying on the views of distinguished past philosophers to search for insights into these problems, has no good rationale. The history of philosophy, and the history of ideas in general, has intrinsic value as an intellectual endeavor, producing historical knowledge, helping to preserve and expand a culture, and renewing our memory of past ideas, but its value cannot be that it helps to solve contemporary or even perennial problems that must be tackled with the most up-to-date knowledge and techniques.
What proponents of the historical approach could answer such an argument? Sauer answers – convincingly according to me – to traditional responses that point out that working with old texts trains one in developing her philosophical abilities. A more interesting counterargument is that approaching philosophy through its history is helpful to put one’s views into perspective, to understand from where one’s beliefs are coming, and more generally to be more sensitive to the contextual elements in the development of one’s thought.[2] In other words, the historical approach to philosophy helps one to know oneself better. I think we can generalize this idea to the whole historical approach to ideas, including economic ideas. However, it’s unclear whether it answers the above points. Putting knowledge and more generally our forms of life into a historical perspective is undoubtedly practically useful and intellectually relevant. But not for answering perennial and contemporary philosophical issues as such.
I imagine that a deeper response pointing out the nature of philosophical knowledge could be developed. It would be too long to do it here but here is a sketch. Let’s say that we can distinguish at least between what I shall call two regimes of knowledge accumulation (RKA). In the first regime, which I will call the Popperian regime, knowledge incrementally accumulates with new and better (i.e., closer to truth) ideas progressively displacing older and less good ideas. This obviously supposes that there are some criteria available to assess the value of ideas and to assert that one is better than the other. In the second regime, the Kuhnian regime, the accumulation of ideas is not progressive but works through “punctuated equilibria”. Ideas take form within paradigms and there are no convincing ways to compare the value of ideas belonging to different paradigms.
I think it is clear that the case for the historical approach is stronger if the RKA in philosophy is Kuhnian rather than Popperian. It is of course controversial whether a particular domain of knowledge (philosophy as well as any science) is appropriately characterized as Popperian or Kuhnian. Admittedly, these are polar cases and it is highly likely that any specific discipline belongs somewhere on the spectrum defined by these polar cases. Now, Sauer’s points are appealing only if you consider that philosophy, like special sciences, rather bends toward the Popperian side of the spectrum. While there is uncertainty about where a discipline lies, intuition suggests that the probability that special sciences are on the Popperian side is higher than philosophy. However, and this is a key even if essentially implicit claim in Sauer’s argument, philosophical knowledge is highly dependent on scientific (empirical and theoretical) knowledge. In other words, the Popperian nature of special sciences somehow contaminates the RKA of philosophy. This naturalistic thesis is now widely popular among philosophers themselves, and if it is accepted then it seems hard to concede that the history of ideas is not relevant to solve scientific problems while making an exception for philosophy.
Again, none of this is to mean that doing history of ideas is useless, nor is an argument that there should be no class on this topic in scientific or philosophical curricula. This questions however the place of historical approaches in the progressive dynamics of academic disciplines. This leads me to the last part of this post regarding the role of historical approaches in what some call the “philosophy of economics” or “economic philosophy”, but that I prefer to label just “philosophy & economics” (P&E). In France at least, P&E is tightly linked to the history of economics at the institutional level. This is partly due to the fact that most of the scholars doing P&E in France are economists, not philosophers, and many of them are coming from the history of economics. We occasionally have among the community not-so-interesting debates about whether P&E is part of the history of economics or the contrary, or if the two fields are independent though overlapping. As a committed (late) Wittgensteinian, when confronted with this kind of definitional issue, my first impulse is just to look at what people are doing and how they use in this context the labels “P&E” and “history of economics”. Then, it becomes fairly clear that P&E cannot be a subset of the history of economics, nor the contrary. It is just too easy to find work that qualifies, by the practitioners’ own usage of the term P&E (or philosophy of economics, or economic philosophy) without any historical dimension. On the other hand, it's also pretty clear that a large fraction of the history of economics work is completely devoid of philosophical dimension, both in the method and in the purpose.
This obviously does not exclude the possibility of using a historical approach when doing P&E, and this is just what many of us are doing. The difference with the history of economics is that the purpose is not to produce historiographical knowledge per se but to use historical methods and perspectives to advance economic and philosophical knowledge. Now, if we grant Sauer’s points, we may wonder whether the historical approach to P&E really is relevant or justified. Until now, my prior was pushing me toward a mostly positive answer to this question. But I may have to revise it!
[1] See also Sauer’s shorter piece summarizing the main ideas of the paper on Daily Nous website.
[2] See the response to Sauer’s article by David Egan, again on Daily Nous.