histofthought1

Introductionixand against one another, is necessarily left out of the Few Great Men approach.This aspect of the historian's work was particularly brought home tome by Quentin Skinner's notable two-volume Foundations ofModern PoliticalThought, the significance of which could be appreciated without adoptingSkinner's own behaviourist methodology.4The continual progress, onward-and-upward approach was demolished forme, and should have been for everyone, by Thomas Kuhn's famed StructureofScientific Revolutions. 5 Kuhn paid no attention to economics, but instead,in the standard manner of philosophers and historians of science, focused onsuch ineluctably 'hard' sciences as physics, chemistry, and astronomy. Bringingthe word 'paradigm' into intellectual discourse, Kuhn demolished what Ilike to call the 'Whig theory of the history of science'. The Whig theory,subscribed to by almost all historians of science, including economics, is thatscientific thought progresses patiently, one year after another developing,sifting, and testing theories, so that science marches onward and upward,each year, decade or generation learning more and possessing ever morecorrect scientific theories. On analogy with the Whig theory of history, coinedin mid-nineteenth century England, which maintained that things are alwaysgetting (and therefore must get) better and better, the Whig historian ofscience, seemingly on firmer grounds than the regular Whig historian, implicitlyor explicitly asserts that 'later is always better' in any particularscientific discipline. The Whig historian (whether of science or of historyproper) really maintains that, for any point of historical time, 'whatever was,was right', or at least better than 'whatever was earlier'. The inevitable resultis a complacent and infuriating Panglossian optimism. In the historiographyof economic thought, the consequence is the firm if implicit position thatevery individual economist, or at least every school of economists, contributedtheir important mite to the inexorable upward march. There can, then, beno such thing as gross systemic error that deeply flawed, or even invalidated,an entire school of economic thought, much less sent the world of economicspermanently astray.Kuhn, however, shocked the philosophic world by demonstrating that thisis simply not the way that science has developed. Once a central paradigm isselected, there is no testing or sifting, and tests of basic assumptions onlytake place after a series of failures and anomalies in the ruling paradigm hasplunged the science into a 'crisis situation'. One need not adopt Kuhn'snihilistic philosophic outlook, his implication that no one paradigm is or canbe better than any other, to realize that his less than starry-eyed view ofscience rings true both as history and as sociology.But if the standard romantic orPanglossian view does not work even in thehard sciences, afortiori it must be totally off the mark in such a 'soft science'as economics, in a discipline where there can be no laboratory testing, and