History and economics are unavoidable disciplines, and in these troubled times, we’d like them to combine their respective geniuses, with history offering the long view, and economics drawing on the most up-to-date array of quantitative methods.
This book is an attempt to bring history and economics into dialogue, and to combine their methods in a way that encourages them to work together, at a time when historians’ radical critique of the primacy of economic relations and representations partly explains their disaffection with economic history. Historians criticize the models used by economists as being too universalizing.
This is not inaccurate, but the limits of the “historical-philosophical observations and prejudices” of pure and perfect competition, symmetry of information and rational expectations, have led economists to seek pragmatism by basing their hypotheses on real observations and clouds of data aimed at drawing conclusions about given periods, breaking, quite rightly, a certain historical continuum if there ever was one. What Paul Samuelson calls “the credibility revolution of empirical testing”!
It’s not a question of studying a few subjects in parallel to compare conclusions, but rather of presenting the advantages, disadvantages and limits of the methods used.
The discussion between economists and historians is organized around two major issues. The first concerns the methodological choices that structure the approaches of the two disciplines. The second issue concerns the fields and themes they now have in common, and on which their studies are currently focused.
The first part is therefore devoted to data, sources and their shortcomings and imperfections.
The second part tackles a theme that was thought to be obsolete: causal relations, the basis of scientific reasoning, but not necessarily in the social sciences. One author even deals frankly with a crisis of causality, distinguishing between “necessary causality and sufficient causality”, questions of scale, causality specific to the “hard” sciences (?) and the need for convergence in the causal approach.
One section is provided by way of example, as it tackles the subject of colonialism: for historians, the weight of colonization remains heavy for the countries concerned, while the last two Nobel Prize winners in Economics have demonstrated the responsibility of successive governments in these countries for their insufficient economic development. Should we “believe” a story or a model?
The final section confronts science and knowledge (a few pages mixing philosophy and technology) on the occasion of the current environmental turnaround and the use of network theory in the appreciation of information and its modes of access.
On reading the book, it becomes clear that the dialogue between disciplines cannot be based on the idea that a single definition of causality is superior to the other and likely to prevail. The type of causality often depends on the question being asked and the researcher’s intellectual biases.
Logical causality and temporal causality are often different. All economic research, beyond “numbers”, must integrate time into the definition of causality and the scope of the databases it uses.
Dominique CHESNEAU
