This collective work brings together 18 historians and economists who compare the respective methodologies of their disciplines and question the ways in which they can be reconciled. They illustrate their reflections through the cross-analysis of three different fields of research: colonialism, the creation of academic knowledge, and women’s work.
The first part of the book focuses on the main biases that distort the sources – namely the stories for the historians and the figures and date for the economists – of their research. The second part covers the logic of processing these sources, and in particular, certain contradictions in the “chains of causality” that make it possible to explain the phenomena. The third part is devoted to the methods of results restitution of these treatments. The authors show the flaws in the narratives, especially analytical ones, that make it possible to explain and discuss the results of the research. They discuss the positive but also negative contributions of the use of Artificial Intelligence in research and expertise practices. In particular, they argue that the “structural thinking” of historians and economists can be distorted by changes in the way phenomena are approached throughout history: data focused on prices and incomes until the mid-nineteenth century, then measured volumes and capital until the end of the twentieth century, before focusing on the behavior of the actors-subjects of society and the economy. In economics, these three stages correspond to the succession of political economy, macroeconomics and narrative economy, and in history, to the movement from the “big history” to the “new history” and then to the historial economics. The authors point out that in economics, the most recent Nobel Prize winners have been historians of economics.
Alain Trannoy and Arundhati Virmani are members of the EHESS.
Note by Jean-Jacques Pluchart
