In what follows, I use stylized facts derived from my own professional career as a member of the History of Economics Society (HES) and the history of economics (HE) community to document and illustrate the changing context of the subdiscipline over the past three decades.Footnote ¹ In the 1990s, the subdiscipline was comprised of a number of national communities. Among the latter the North American community held a dominant position and was quite different from its continental European counterparts, the French and Italian in particular.Footnote ² Not only were its academic culture and environment much more competitive but they were also more open to non-disciplinary history of economics.Footnote ³ Over the past two decades, however, the growing domination of the continental European community has created a new context in which the identity of the North American community in general and that of the HES in particular has become uncertain.

Back in 1996, when I attended my first HES conference in Vancouver, the history of economics looked like an academic archipelago, with North America at its center.Footnote ⁴ The subdiscipline rested on HES’s core institutions: the annual conference, but also the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET), launched in 1990 as a sequel to the former History of Economics Society Bulletin created in 1979. To this list, one can add the series “Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought” made of a selection of papers presented at the HES that was published from 1989 to 2000, and the journal History of Political Economy (HOPE), which played a significant role in the HE subdiscipline in the US since its founding in 1969. Around HES stood several national communities in Europe (France, Italy, Great Britain, etc.) and elsewhere (Australia and Japan, for instance). These national communities emerged through a historical process marked by specific national traditions, even though they were all shaped to some extent by the same critical stance toward mainstream economics and the capitalist system that took place at the end of the 1960s and well into the 1970s in most of them.

In the mid-1990s, the French community was comprised of three groups.Footnote ⁵ The core group consisted of heterodox economists: Sraffians, Marxians, a few Austrians and evolutionists, who were preaching one version or another of HE as a way to amend existing economic theory (what Ghislain Deleplace (Reference Deleplace and Weintraub2002) calls the “analytical attitude”). There were also a number of mainstream economists doing HE as a side activity (what Deleplace (Reference Deleplace and Weintraub2002) calls the “cultural attitude” of HE); and there were a few economists interested in epistemological and methodological issues who regarded HE as a catalog of case studies. Outside economics, there was another group consisting of historians, notably Jean-Claude Perrot and his PhD students at La Sorbonne, as well as sociologists and historians of science, linked to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, who had developed an interest in the history of economics and used tools and epistemologies that differed from those of the groups mentioned above. Perrot (Reference Perrot1992), in particular, promoted a non-disciplinary historical approach that combined intellectual history and cultural history and did away with the “great predecessors” tradition.

The French community was not much internationalized then. Although several senior scholars had connections with other national communities—especially in Italy—publishing in international journals was still the exception even if things changed after the creation of the European Journal for the History of Economic Thought (EJHET) in 1993. Likewise, in 1996 giving papers in international conferences was far from usual for French scholars.Footnote ⁶ The annual series of European Conferences in the History of Economics (ECHE) had been launched in 1995 and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought had yet to be created.

Accordingly, French PhD students, once their dissertations were completed, usually looked for a job when having in their CV only one article published in a French outlet such as Revue économique, Revue d’économie politique, or the two main French HE journals: the Cahiers d’économie politique (CEP) and Économie et sociétés, Série PE (Œconomia, Pensée économique; Œconomia in the following). CEP was a stronghold of heterodoxy while Œconomia was more diverse, publishing intellectual history, historical epistemology, and philosophical articles alongside heterodox and history of economic analysis articles.Footnote ⁷ In the mid-1990s, no PhD students and only a handful of senior French scholars had published in HOPE or JHET. French HE, especially the young scholars, had limited exposure to the international environment. Few French PhD students attended the HES before 2000. The French community was based on mild clientelism: PhD students depended on their research units and since the latter were rather small, they depended mostly on their PhD advisors, who decided whether (or not) to introduce them to their academic networks, to get funding for their PhD and participation in conferences, access to journals, etc. Footnote ⁸ Moreover, as there were very limited outside/anonymous evaluations for one’s work, PhD advisors and their academic networks were crucial to establish the scientific reputation of PhD students and young researchers.Footnote ⁹

During my PhD, I came to understand that the North American HE academic culture was quite different from my French one.Footnote ¹⁰ In the North American economics profession, one’s reputation and position were mainly based on one’s ability to publish in peer-reviewed journals.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, journals played a much more important role in one’s career in the US, both in economics and in HE, than they did in Europe in general and France in particular. However, as most of the US historians of economics were by profession economists, it means that most of them had a limited engagement with HE, which offered both limited and declining opportunities to publish in high-end economic journals (Duarte and Giraud Reference Duarte and Giraud2016). The latter also explains why the North American HE community was producing much fewer PhDs than Europe and France in particular.

Another important difference is that there was more methodological and historiographical diversity in the North American HE. Most US historians of economics considered themselves economists and had no specific interest in introducing more pluralism in HE. However, because they had long realized that the future of the HE community was in danger in the highly competitive academic environment of US economics, the Duke University group of historians of economics and the journal it published, HOPE, have had a long-standing commitment toward pluralistic historiographical approaches (Goodwin Reference Goodwin and Weintraub2002; Weintraub Reference Weintraub and Weintraub2002b; Giraud Reference Giraud2019). HE scholars gravitating around the Duke group were interested, among other things, in history and social studies of science and they favored more historical forms of HE. Although they were outnumbered within the HES, the reputation and magnetism of History of Political Economy—supported by its annual volumes and mini-symposiums (Giraud Reference Giraud2019, pp. 643–658)—placed it in an ideal position to set the agenda of the main historiographical debates.Footnote ¹²

In the 1980s and 1990s, although the North American HE community was still declining within the economics profession, it was central in the HE international community. HES had no counterpart in continental Europe, where national societies were small and recent.Footnote ¹³ Likewise, until the mid-1990s, the HES conferences had no competitors in terms of attendance and international exposure. In addition, with impact factors and more generally publication in international journals playing an increased role in research assessment in HE in Europe as well, publishing in one of the North American HE journals became especially important to the careers of European historians of economics.Footnote ¹⁴

Although I was not aware of any of this when I attended my first HES conference in 1996, I later realized that what I liked about HES (and missed in France) was its open-mindedness toward more historicized approaches. At the time, with no funding for my PhD, I stood at the margins of the profession with uncertain prospects. At the HES conference, I presented my paper before senior researchers and attended many sessions. I felt I belonged. With HES I had access to a different community, in which my research was appreciated for itself and not for what I represented within my community. At the HES, I was on an equal footing (inadequate command of academic English included) with most of my French and continental European colleagues.

I realized that the best way for me to gain recognition was to publish articles in international journals. I understood that there was an important international HE community and that it was anglophone. Accordingly, I strove to perfect my English writing skills and consistently presented papers at international conferences. After the 1996 conference, I also felt entitled to connect with historians. Thus, I contacted Perrot and developed a long-lasting intellectual relationship with him and some of his students, among whom was Christine Théré, and later on with several US historians as well. These two moves were crucial. They enabled me to pursue my research interests using more historical methods drawn from cultural, intellectual history and history of science while publishing in leading HE journals. Being invited to international conferences (both in HE and history) and publishing in English allowed me to accumulate symbolic capital and escape my initially low academic status in the French HE community. Similarly, through Perrot and Théré, I obtained a post-doc position in the historical unit of the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), which gave me the time and resources necessary to build my publication record and eventually get a permanent position in an economics department in 2002, three years after having defended my PhD dissertation.Footnote ¹⁵

From the early 2000s, as the North American HE was opening even more to other historical methods, HOPE, especially its annual supplements, included an increasing number of such articles, and, starting in 1999, the JHET also featured a growing number of historical pieces (Giraud Reference Giraud2019). The years 1995 to 2015 can be viewed as a golden age for methodological pluralism in the North American HE.Footnote ¹⁶ Not only HOPE and JHET published an increasing share of articles that went beyond economic analysis/rational reconstruction, but historians of economics trained as economists occasionally published articles in historical journals such as Science in Context (Weintraub and Mirowski Reference Weintraub and Mirowski2008; Fontaine Reference Fontaine2010; Düppe and Weintraub Reference Düppe and Weintraub2014), Isis (Leonard Reference Leonard1998; Fontaine Reference Fontaine2002), Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines (Morgan and Maas Reference Morgan and Maas2002), Revue d’histoire des sciences (Morgan Reference Morgan2004), Minerva (Mata and Scheiding Reference Mata and Scheiding2012), Past and Present (Charles and Cheney Reference Charles and Cheney2013), and the Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences (Klaes and Van Horn Reference Van Horn and Klaes2011; Fontaine Reference Fontaine2015), as well as books that were reaching out to audiences outside the HE community (e.g., Mirowski Reference Mirowski1994, Reference Mirowski2002; Backhouse and Fontaine Reference Backhouse and Fontaine2010a, Reference Backhouse and Fontaine2010b).

In continental Europe, despite the efforts of a few scholars who developed series of seminars, workshops, and conferences, such as the “European Conference on the History of Economics,” “History of Economies as Culture,” “History of Recent Economics,” and “History of Recent Social Science,” the HE community continued to be structured along the same principles I had experienced when I began my PhD. It had been and still is dominated by scholars who considered HE as another way of doing economics and have little patience for historical methods.Footnote ¹⁷ The European journals—History of Economic Ideas, EJHET, Cahiers d’Économie Politique, Revue d’histoire de la pensée économique—are clear illustrations of that orientation. Although the recently founded on-line journals Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics (https://ejpe.org/journal) and Œconomia (https://journals.openedition.org/oeconomia/) have shown more historiographical diversity, European HE offers a rather grim landscape for scholars interested in more historical (and sociological) approaches. Moreover, the functioning of European institutions including its journals continues to be constrained by methodological divides and a mild form of clientelism that maintain their almost exclusive orientation towards heterodoxy and disciplinary history.

The HE landscape has been changing again since the mid-2010s and not for the best. First, the output of European HE journals that publish almost exclusively disciplinary HE has increased dramatically since 2000.Footnote ¹⁸ HE scholars who cherish historiographical diversity increasingly publish in non-HE outlets and look for jobs in disciplines in which their research output is considered more positively. In this respect, it is worth noting that some of the most creative European HE scholars who have completed their PhD since 2005 have had difficulties to find HE positions within European economics faculties, where disciplinary historians of economics rule. Several of them have taken refuge in history of science, human sciences departments, and outside Europe.Footnote ¹⁹ Second, the generation of the golden age of historiographical pluralism has retired or is close to retirement. Since the HE and its journals do not fare well in the US economics profession, that generation could not reproduce itself. Hence, the shrinking of the HE population means that the HES, the JHET, and the Duke’s Center for the History of Economics have increasingly opened their gates to continental European historians of economics with an exclusive interest in disciplinary history. The consequence is that methodological diversity within the subdiscipline has diminished and the differences that existed between 1996 and the mid-2010s between the US and European HE communities have eroded. Historiographical debates about thick ways of doing HE, and the coming together of history of science and HE, have faded away in recent years. One important aspect is that the growing interest for HE in neighboring disciplines (sociology, history and sociology of science, intellectual history, among others) has not found an echo in the HE community as a whole, despite a recent survey on this issue in HOPE (Fontaine Reference Fontaine2016).Footnote ²⁰ The majority of HE scholars tend to mimic the economist profession at its worst by rarely quoting articles and books outside the economics discipline (including HE) and this has dire consequences (see discussion below, footnote 22).

These transformations have created an identity problem for the HES. The growing number of continental Europeans (or former students of European institutions) in the HES and its committees, while a normal thing in an international society, creates an issue in terms of methodological pluralism. Thus, there is a very significant risk that the HES and its journal will, in the near future, exclude or at the very least sideline non-disciplinary history of economics and those who practice it, as ESHET and EJHET have done consistently since their beginning. I believe that the best way to counter this trend is to develop a systematic policy of opening HES to groups of scholars in neighboring disciplines interested in HE and to support actively a methodologically diverse HE. As we have seen above, it has been the case in the past and I am convinced that it is essential that such differentiation exists to enable scholars interested in non-disciplinary history approaches to continue working within the HE community. In addition, as the recent episode that saw the temporary removal of three major HE journals from Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports shows, there is a real academic risk linked to the lack of methodological pluralism within the HE community.Footnote ²¹ If the HE community continues to pursue a policy of non-communication with related subdisciplines such as intellectual history, economic history, cultural history, and history and sociology of science, HE journals will end up—and to a large extent that is already the case—getting citations only from other HE journals (and there are not many of those). Likewise, historians of economics will be invited only to HE conferences and their academic conversations will be strictly limited to fellow historians of economics.

My personal experience—and this is why I value so much the HES—is that, since its creation fifty years ago, the HES has been a venue in which methodological pluralism is welcome. I believe that this crucial component of the HES identity is endangered. Therefore, I think that the HES needs to act proactively in order to preserve it.

I will close this article with two practical suggestions for the HES that, in my opinion, may help with preservation. First, why should the HES sponsor session(s) only at the Allied Social Science Associations conferences? It should do the same at conferences held by some of the neighboring academic societies such as the History of Science annual meeting, the Social Science History Association annual conference, the World Economic History Congress tri-annual conference, etc. I think it would be an important move to assert the international and interdisciplinary identity of the HES and it would help to capture the attention of scholars from other disciplines for the work of historian of economics and HE journals. Second, the HES may sponsor a yearly survey of articles in HE published the year or two years before including articles published outside economic and HE journals. Footnote ²² It will help historians of economics to be more cognizant of the secondary literature published in other disciplines and, therefore, to be able to create a much-needed dialogue with those disciplines.