In recent years, the focus of historians of economic thought has changed to also include the ideas and practices of contemporary economists. This has opened up new questions regarding the utilization of sources, choice of method, narrative styles, and ethical issues, as well as a new awareness of the historian's place, role, and task. This book brings together leading contributors to provide, for the first time, a methodological overview of the historiography of economics. Emphasising the quality of the scholarship of recent decades, the book seeks to provide research tools for future historians of economic thought, as well as to any historians of social science with an interest in historiographic issues.

In recent years, the focus of historians of economic thought has changed to also include the ideas and practices of contemporary economists. This has opened up new questions regarding the utilization of sources, choice of method, narrative styles, and ethical issues, as well as a new awareness of the historian's place, role, and task. This book brings together leading contributors to provide, for the first time, a methodological overview of the historiography of economics. Emphasising the quality of the scholarship of recent decades, the book seeks to provide research tools for future historians of economic thought, as well as to any historians of social science with an interest in historiographic issues.

Volume 35A of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology features a symposium on historical epistemology, guest edited by Till Duppe and Harro Maas. The symposium includes new research from the guest editors, as well as from Loic Charles and Christine There, Hsiang-Ke Chao, Tobias Vogelsang, and Thomas Stapleford. This internationally renowned cast of contributors offers a variety of perspectives on one of the major approaches in empirical philosophy of science and economic thought. Volume 35A also includes a new research paper by Cameron Weber on the paradoxical notion of value employed in the economics of art and culture. An archival piece by Marc Nerlove, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal in 1969, completes the volume. Originally written in the summer of 1953, when Nerlove was a 19-year-old graduate student serving as research assistant to Jacob Marschak and Tjalling Koopmans at the Cowles Commission, the paper relates the ideas of Cournot to the concept of Nash equilibrium. The paper was long-forgotten by Nerlove and has only recently been rediscovered among the Marschak Papers at UCLA. Olav Bjerkholt contributes a foreword to Nerlove's archival piece.

"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 Duppe 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-a-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."

How did modern man come to believe in the object of the economy? What hopes made us accept scientific authority about this illusive thing? What kinds of persons were attracted by objective knowledge in economic discourse? And how does this knowledge guide our economic life? The Making of the Economy tackles such questions surrounding the modern notion of the economy with a fresh look from phenomenological philosophy. In a historical narrative of economic discourses, Till Duppe shows that only due to the scientific culture of economics we speak of an economy. Economic science made the economy. Our economic experiences alone do not trigger an interest in the economy-which makes Husserl's case for the "forgetfulness of the life-world." Duppe's historical narrative focuses on the emergence of formal economic analysis out of a series of successive life-worlds, or concrete historical situations, an approach which generates a new substantive understanding of both the history of economics and the current discourse of crisis surrounding economics. The book will appeal to historians and philosophers of the social sciences, as well as scholars of history, philosophy, and economics.