I don’t seem to be able to fully grasp Mark Blaug’s distinction between a relativist and an absolutist approach to the history of economics – first introduced in Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962) – and that is a source of much frustration. At first sight, the distinction seems obvious enough. Relativist historians emphasize the social, political, personal etc context in which economic ideas were developed; absolutist historians view history as a sequence of Great Economists building on and/or refuting each other’s theories. Obviously, most histories of economics use a bit of both.
To figure out what I don’t get about it, I thought I should perhaps look at that field that is best known for using the relativism-absolutism dichotomy: Ethics. If you evaluate an action or an opinion against the yardstick of country-, social-, and history-specific context (which may differ from your own benchmark), you take a relativist approach. If you judge the action or opinion against (somehow established) universal ethical principles, you take an absolutist approach. Part of Roy Weintraub’s recent essay on Keynes’ anti-Semitism I think seeks to bring that often implicit discussion to the fore in histories of Keynes – but I’m digressing.
The point is that in ethics you support either the one or the other. In the end it really is a matter of personal moral conviction whether you think the death penalty in the U.S. is a culture-specific ethical principle we have to accept, or a violation (or not) of universal ethical principles. But where it concerns intellectual history of economics, I don’t see how relativism versus absolutism is a matter of personal conviction in that sense.
Put differently, if I think theory 1 of economist A should be understood principally within the context of the time and place in which s/he lived, while I think theory 2 of economist B is first of all a response to theory 3 of economist C, that could make for very fine history. But when I say that principle X of People 10 should be viewed in its cultural context, while arguing that principle Y of People 11 is to be judged against universal benchmarks, I would be quickly pushed aside as one more inconsistent philosopher.
Perhaps the real distinction Blaug was after was that between good history and bad history, with bad historians often taking a relativist approach (say Marxist historians). We’re talking 1960s and 1970s here after all.
Then again, it can’t be just that.
Comments
It helps to think about this historically. When Blaug first wrote, it was possible to think of science as "produced" by social and economic "forces". The alternative to that kind of thinking, which grew out of Marxist thought(e.g. Bernal, and the historian of mathematics Dirk Struik), was to take a position that science "caused" itself, and that science changed according to its own internal logic. Though Blaug called this "relativist v. absolutist" most others used the terms "external v. internal" explanations for theory change.
In his later years, Blaug started using "rational v. historical" reconstructions to characterize ways of writing the history of economics, but he again used those terms idiosyncratically, and differently from the ways most historians used them (e.g. as Lakatos used them in Proofs and Refutations to distinguish between philosophical "as if" narratives and historical "just so" narratives).
Blaug was though consistent all through, creating binaries which could be interpreted as "bad history", or the kinds of history of economics others wrote, and "good history", which was what he wrote.
He was tone deaf to historians' discourse which took Hayden White seriously, took Foucault seriously, and took Bruno Latour seriously. Mentally stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, his intellectual isolation became evident in the Capri Conference of 1989, whose proceedings appeared in the Appraising Economic Theories volume which he edited with Neil DeMarchi: he excluded papers by Harry Collins and Karin Knorr-Cetina, and he and DeMarchi could not agree to write a joint Introduction. He was also mostly oblivious of modern economics, never seeming to understand that his preoccupation with "formalism" only demonstrated how out of touch he was with the economics profession. Personally I attribute much of this to his immersion in the history and philosophy of economics communities and to maintaining his position as arbiter of taste by producing the never-ending series of Edward Elgar compilations: whereas in his younger days he could carry on an intelligent conversation with a young labor economist say, he was no longer able to do so after he left England.
Sorry for being so late to respond.... I though we had fixed that automatic email indicating a comment, but apparently we haven't.
@erw. Many thanks. Ok, so Blaug's binaries are basically different words for "bad history" versus "good history". The big question then is: what exactly was good history to Blaug? My hunch would be that to Blaug, as to many pre-war economists, HET was one building block for doing economics. That is, economics was the further development of principles, or doctrines, developed by economists in the past - pretty much as philosophy or parts of political science function to this day. However, Blaug felt he had to defend this history-based approach of economics against the new natural science/formalist turn in economics. It is that last part, I think, that produced the various dichotomies, in an attempt to ensure that the new formalist economists would continue to look favorably at "good" history of economics. Anyway, let's see if I can get that elaborated into a paper....
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