Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T19:19:39.323Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2004 HES Presidential Address: Autobiographical Memory and the Historiography of Economics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

E. Roy Weintraub
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0097, USA.

Extract

In his autobiographical piece, “A Jevonian Seditionist,” Sidney Weintraub ([1983]1989, p. 50) recalled that in 1957 he sent an offprint of his paper on the micro-foundations of aggregate supply to D. H. Robertson. He remembered that “Robertson generously wrote me that it was ‘lucid and definitive,’ and that thenceforth he would not return to the subject again. I confess that I have lost or misplaced his letter, along with the one by [Alan] Sproul, in my move to Canada, though they were prized possessions.” And I have my own memory of a conversation with Sidney in which he told me that Robertson had written in that letter “If this is not what Keynes meant, it is what he should have meant.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Backhouse, R. E. and Middleton, R. (Eds) (2000) Exemplary Economists, Volumes 1 and 2 (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar).Google Scholar
Blanchard, O. (2000) What Do We Know About Macroeconomics That Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115 (11), pp. 1375–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keynes, J. M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt Brace).Google Scholar
Kregel, J. A. (Ed.) (1989) Recollections of Eminent Economists, Vols. 1 and 2 (New York: New York University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larsen, S. F. (1996) Memorable Books: Recall of Reading and Its Personal Context, in: MacNealy, M. S. and Kreuz, R. (Eds) Empirical Approaches to Literature and Aesthetics, pp. 583600 (Norwood, NJ: Ablex).Google Scholar
Mackavey, W., Malley, J. E., and Stewart, A. J. (1991) Remembering Autobiographically Consequential Experiences: Content Analysis of Psychologists' Accounts of Their Lives, Psychology and Aging, 6(1), pp. 50–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mannheim, K. (1928) The Problem of Generations, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, pp. 276322 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).Google Scholar
Moggridge, D. E. (2003) Biography and the History of Economics, in: Samuels, W. J., Biddle, J. E., and Davis, J. B. (Eds) A Companion to the History of Economic Thought (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell).Google Scholar
Neisser, U. (1981) John Dean's Memory: A Case Study, Cognition, 9, pp. 122.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubin, D. C., Wetzler, S. E. et al. , (1986) Autobiographical Memory Across the Lifespan, in: Rubin, D. C. (Ed.) Autobiographical Memory, pp. 202–21 (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rubin, D. C. (1997) Beginnings of a Theory of Autobiographical Remembering, in: Thompson, C. P., Herrmann, D. J., Bruce, D., Read, J. D., Payne, D. G. and Toglia, M. P. (Eds) Autobiographical Memory: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, pp 4767 (Mahwah, NJ and London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).Google Scholar
Rubin, D. C. and Berntsen, D. (2003) Life Scripts Help to Maintain Autobiographical Memories of Highly Positive, but Not Highly Negative, Events, Memory & Cognition, 31 (1), pp. 114.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubin, D. C., Rahhal, T. A., and Poon, L. W. (1998) Things Learned in Early Adulthood are Remembered Best, Memory & Cognition, 26 (1), pp. 319.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schuman, H. and Scott, J. (1989) Generations and Collective Memory, American Sociological Review, 54 (3), pp. 359–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sehulster, J. R. (1996) In My Era: Evidence for the Perception of a Special Period of the Past, Memory, 4(2), pp. 145–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shackle, G. L. S. (1967) The Years of High Theory: Invention and Tradition in Economic Thought 1926–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Simon, P. (1986) Bubble Boy, Graceland, Warner Brothers, released 08 28, 1986.Google Scholar
Stigler, G. (1970) Review of Robbins's “The Evolution of Economic Theory,” Economica, New Series, 37 (148), pp. 425–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szenberg, M. (Ed.) (1992) Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Szenberg, M. (Ed.) (1998) Passion and Craft: Economists at Work (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weintraub, E. R. (2002) How Economics Became a Mathematical Science (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).Google Scholar
Weintraub, S. (1983) A Jevonian Seditionist: A Mutiny to Enhance the Economic Bounty? In: Kregel, J. A. (Ed.) Recollections of Eminent Economists, Volume 1, pp. xix + 234 (New York: New York University Press, 1989).Google Scholar