STOREP CONFERENCES, STOREP 2018 - Whatever Has Happened to Political Economy?

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Political Economy without History of Economic Thought? Why Economics should not Forget History
Dieter Böegenhold

Last modified: 2018-06-20

Abstract


Especially when an economic crisis occurs, as it was in the last big crisis in 2008, contemporaries tend to question certainties of belief systems including academic systems of knowledge. Paradigms evolve to become a subject of inquiry. One of those new topics is a claim to increasingly acknowledge history of economic thought (HET) as an important, although neglected, domain of economic inquiry. During the last decades, HET has mostly been abolished or has disappeared in many contemporary teaching curricula in economics. An – unforecasted – crisis teaches us the lesson that our academic understanding may be incomplete. The relative renaissance of history of economic thought is remarkable since it is the lesson of the 20th century that economics forgot history (Hodgson 2001) for systematic reasons. However, can we learn anything by reading in HET?  The answer is that HET makes current debate less sterile because it embeds the matter into a flux of changing paradigms. Many brilliant argumentations exist hinting to the fact that HET has to be interpreted as a permanent over-writing process of academic failures by which we can learn about directions of new knowledge. The paper will be about the discussion why economics should not forget history of economic thought since HET is always much more than watching old movies.


Keywords


Economic Education and Teaching of Economics, History of Economic Thought, Economic Methodology

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