The ‘Histories’ of Economic Discourse

It is commonplace today to find Adam Smith and ‘his book’ — An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — treated as founding modern economics, both in the pronouncements of ideologists of the market economy and in the judgements of historians of economics. That in some way the work of Smith is a turning point in the ‘history of economics’ is clear from those accounts which address themselves to the forerunners of ‘modern economics’ (Gordon, 1975; Johnson, 1937; Taylor, 1965), where Smith is taken as the end-point of such prehistories. The placing of Smith as the origin of modernism, while providing convenient timetables for the arrangement of histories, does however raise some fundamental historiographical questions concerning the object of a history of economics, and the manner in which it is organised. Such questions (which form the problems considered in the first section of this essay) are usually speedily dismissed in orthodox histories by the invocation of a set of devices which constitute their methodological stock-in-trade: the identification of neglected predecessors, the construction of terminological biographies, the identification of a ‘philosophical heritage’, the discussion of theoretical influence, and so on. Two major difficulties can be said to emerge in such writing: firstly, what is the alleged ‘history of economics’ a history of? (what is the object of this discourse?); and secondly, what is historical about this ‘history’?