The history of economic thought has traditionally focused on the work of individuals no longer living. Recently, however, historians have begun to use their tools of analysis on the work of contemporary economists. New Economics and Its Writing compiles evidence of this shift, with thirteen essays by scholars interested in catalyzing conversation between contemporary economists and historians of economics.
This new focus requires new methods of analysis–historiographic strategies involving far greater archival resources, for instance, and often nontraditional resources, such as electronic records. Essays collected here address these changes and examine how this new emphasis on the work of living economists can and will entail interaction between the producer of theory and the historian, complicating the latter’s role. Chapters discuss topics such as the emergence of subdisciplines in economics, social-contextual perspectives on the writing of economics, the dynamics of idea development, and the recent incursion of noneconomic thinking–such as engineering methods and mathematical models–into economics. New Economics and Its Writing shows that attention to recent, ongoing economics from historians of economics has the potential to revitalize and transform the history of economics as an area of investigation. This volume is the 1997 Annual Supplement to the journal History of Political Economy. All 1997 subscribers will receive a copy of this book as part of their annual subscription.

Contributors. Timothy L. Alborn, Marcel Boumans, Joshua Cohen, John B. Davis, Ross B. Emmett, Paul Harrison, Daniel M. Hausman, Mary L. Hirschfeld, S. Todd Lowry, Steven G. Medema, Philip Mirowski, Philippe Mongin, S. Abu Turab Rizvi, Esther-Mirjam Sent