In the paper the development of economic history will be placed within the evolution of Western thought and culture. Therefore an analysis of the connections between economic history and contemporary epistemology will be carried out. In this perspective an analogy with the traditional division between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy would appear to be useful for economic history too: the first had long prevailed in Anglo-Saxon, the second in continental, culture. This partition evokes and embraces the antithesis between scientific and humanist culture, between logic and rhetoric, analysis and interpretation, conceptual clarification and visions of the world. The paper suggest that the opposition that loomed large over the post W.W.II decades between Anglo-American and European economic histories can also be conceived as a specific form of the wider opposition between ‘analytic style’ and ‘continental style’.
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Paper provided by University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
112.
Find related papers by JEL classification: N01 - Economic History - - General - - - Development of the Discipline: Historiographical; Sources and Methods A12 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines B41 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology - - - Economic Methodology
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