History of Economic Thought
Via Organizations and Markets I found this book review talking about the history of economic thought:
George Stigler began his banquet speech at the Glasgow University bicentennial of the publication of the Wealth of Nations with the now frequently quoted salutation, “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago.” (quoted in Meek, p. 3) Thirty odd years later the remark remains true, though ironically not in the Economics Department. Of the fourteen young scholars whose work is published in this book, five earned their Ph.D.s at the University of Chicago, none in economics. Indeed of the fifteen only four are economists, despite the book’s placement in Routledge’s Studies in the History of Economics series. This is reflective of the fact that Smith scholarship has largely moved away from seeing WN and its seminal role in the nineteenth century development of economics as a discipline as Smith’s crowning achievement. The focus today is largely on seeing Smith’s system as a whole, of which The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the foundational work….
As an historian of economics, though, I was particularly interested
to see what the younger generation is doing with Smith’s economics.
The answer is “not much,” although I do not mean this in a negative
way at all.
My comment at the blog:
Here’s another possibility: Wealth of Nations is “talked out”. Economists have finished up the topic of the history of thought– at least, pre-1940 thought— and gone on to other things. People in history-of-thought fields, e.g. history of science, history of philosophy, intellectual history, etc. have nowhere to go, so they look for less-analyzed books by classic philosophers instead.