Although there are various books looking at the history of economics, the historiography of economics, or how we approach, write, think about, and talk about the history of economics, is a relatively unexamined topic. Most histories of economics run through "the canon" picking up idea after idea as the procession leads to the present time. This appears to be the case since most histories of economics are written by individuals socialized as economists who are interested in the historical antecedents of modern ideas. As historians would say, narratives constructed in this manner are over interpreted and under researched. E. Roy Weintraub's influential research is characterized by a self-consciousness about historiography, his individual approach to the subject serving as a touchstone for discussions on the history of economics. This new volume not only collects Weintraub's most controversial research, but knits together the various strands, extending and elaborating on his previous arguments. This book shows that there is a serious historiographic stance that is possible for historians of economics to consider and adopt. It includes a detailed bibliography and short guide to resources for historians of modern economics.
In How Economics Became a Mathematical Science E. Roy Weintraub traces the history of economics through the prism of the history of mathematics in the twentieth century. As mathematics has evolved, so has the image of mathematics, explains Weintraub, such as ideas about the standards for accepting proof, the meaning of rigor, and the nature of the mathematical enterprise itself. He also shows how economics itself has been shaped by economists’ changing images of mathematics. Whereas others have viewed economics as autonomous, Weintraub presents a different picture, one in which changes in mathematics—both within the body of knowledge that constitutes mathematics and in how it is thought of as a discipline and as a type of knowledge—have been intertwined with the evolution of economic thought. Weintraub begins his account with Cambridge University, the intellectual birthplace of modern economics, and examines specifically Alfred Marshall and the Mathematical Tripos examinations—tests in mathematics that were required of all who wished to study economics at Cambridge. He proceeds to interrogate the idea of a rigorous mathematical economics through the connections between particular mathematical economists and mathematicians in each of the decades of the first half of the twentieth century, and thus describes how the mathematical issues of formalism and axiomatization have shaped economics. Finally, How Economics Became a Mathematical Science reconstructs the career of the economist Sidney Weintraub, whose relationship to mathematics is viewed through his relationships with his mathematician brother, Hal, and his mathematician-economist son, the book’s author.
The remarkable story and personalities behind one of the most important theories in modern economics Finding Equilibrium explores the post–World War II transformation of economics by constructing a history of the proof of its central dogma—that a competitive market economy may possess a set of equilibrium prices. The model economy for which the theorem could be proved was mapped out in 1954 by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu collaboratively, and by Lionel McKenzie separately, and would become widely known as the "Arrow-Debreu Model." While Arrow and Debreu would later go on to win separate Nobel prizes in economics, McKenzie would never receive it. Till Düppe and E. Roy Weintraub explore the lives and work of these economists and the issues of scientific credit against the extraordinary backdrop of overlapping research communities and an economics discipline that was shifting dramatically to mathematical modes of expression. Based on recently opened archives, Finding Equilibrium shows the complex interplay between each man's personal life and work, and examines compelling ideas about scientific credit, publication, regard for different research institutions, and the awarding of Nobel prizes. Instead of asking whether recognition was rightly or wrongly given, and who were the heroes or villains, the book considers attitudes toward intellectual credit and strategies to gain it vis-à-vis the communities that grant it. Telling the story behind the proof of the central theorem in economics, Finding Equilibrium sheds light on the changing nature of the scientific community and the critical connections between the personal and public rewards of scientific work.
This work is concerned with the ways in which the talk of the 1930s evolved into technical analysis of some mathematical structures. It describes the context for the history of that change and shows how the history of modern economics can be seen as a confluence of several disparate traditions.
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