Often papers begin with an idea. Once the paper is written, sometimes little sometimes much effort goes into finding a title. This lecture worked the other way round. It started with the title, which I passed on to Roy Weintraub, my successor as President of the Society, when I still had but the vaguest idea ol what I would write. When Roy heardmy title he pointed me to a passage from C. Vann Woodward, that he hadhimself quotedin Stablizing Dynamics:

Lost causes, especially those that foster loyalties and nostalgic memories are among the most prolific breeders of historiography. If survivors deem the cause not wholly lost andperhaps in some measure retrievable, the search of the past becomes more frantic and the books about it more numerous. Blame must be fixed, villains found, heroes celebrated, old quarrels settled, old dreams restored, and motives vindicated. Amid the ruins controversy thrives and books proliferate (quoted by Weintraub 1991, p. 125, from Vann Woodward 1986).

It is an unusual and memorable privilege to address so international a gathering here in North Carolina on the Fourth of July. American nationalism in recent times has not been very broad-minded, and I'm envious of a society that can attract so many participants from all over the world. But the issue of cosmopolitanism and parochialism pertains to academic discipline as well as to nationality. Historians and economists do not always understand one another very well, and while economists are able to bring in bigger incomes and to maintain a higher public profile, historians maintain a certain authority in regard to scholarly writing about the past. Practitioners of history of economics have often been upbraided for failing to write “real” history, and I have been known to write in this vein. At least I am among those who have tried to persuade members of this society of the merits of history, history of science, and science studies as models for writing history of economics. At the same time I have been seduced by the fascination of this field to devote much of my own research to it, and in these efforts I have come to admire and to draw inspiration from what is distinctive in historical writing on economics, as well as what seems most familiar from the standpoint of the historical discipline.

Harry Dexter White is remembered today as the “other” founding father of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, almost always as an afterthought as homage is paid to his far more renowned British counterpart, John Maynard Keynes. In the months leading up to and beyond the U.S. entry into World War II, White and Keynes independently drafted plans for a postwar stabilization fund aimed at restoring multilateral trade with convertible currencies. They traded plans in 1942 and then worked jointly on increasingly detailed proposals that led eventually to the creation of the IMF and World Bank. White is also remembered as a man who was accused of being a Soviet spy during the war, who died of a heart attack in 1948 just three days after giving a spirited and emotional public defense of his character before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and whose name was dragged out prominently five years later in an ugly battle between the Eisenhower Administration and former President Truman. Squeezed into the shadows between the luminosity of Keynes and the glaring excesses of McCarthyism, White's reputation has long been in need of a more sober inspection in the light of history.

In 1933, Portugal was officially converted to a corporatist state, a state where it was accepted that the semi-autonomous bodies representing the various branches of economic and social activity would have formal powers in defining public policies. In such a context, an important change also occurred at the level of economic theories and doctrines, in keeping with the novelties emanating from both the legal and political fields.

This paper investigates the actions of a small, yet influential group of American economists who sought to claim economic history for themselves and use it as a springboard to launch a wider transformation of economics. Their actions constitute an episode of dissent in the history of twentieth century economics, albeit an unusual one. These dissenters were not a socially or intellectually marginalized group, but rather a set of privileged scholars who were able to leverage their contacts within the profession and amongst its patrons to further their vision. Their actions could almost be described in Kuhnian terms: they consciously sought to trigger a “paradigm shift” to bring about a social science better suited, in their views, to a world in political and economic turmoil (Kuhn 1962). In spite of the Kuhnian allusion to “scientific revolution,” this paper is not about the 1960s “cliometric revolution,” but about the 1940s and '50s and the little known events that led to the creation of the Economic History Association, the Journal of Economic History, and Explorations in Entrepreneurial History (subsequently Explorations in Economic History).

Economics in the 1960s was host to a number of dissenting movements challenging the profession's mainstream theories. As this mainstream changed in the 1970s, the dissenters also underwent a transformation of their own. By the late 1970s the dispersed dissenting voices had congregated to form groups of neo-Austrians, post-Keynesians, neo-Marxists and radical economists. Retrospectively, the 1970s appear as a period of intense negotiation among dissenters as they erected theoretical and methodological boundaries and institutions (associations, journals, seminars) that would come to define them. They were constructing not just conditions for carrying on their work but also a narrative perception of who they were, what they stood for and what was the nature of the profession they inhabited, which I hereafter call “identity” or “self-image.” The dispersed critiques were being redrawn into new sociological unities inside the profession. This paper aims to track one of the routes that brought dispersed critique into an organized and self-conscious grouping, self-identified as Post Keynesian economics. The broad question addressed is how did the Post Keynesians construct their identity?

The answer to this question might seem obvious: like Everest, dissent and controversy are there. However, for most academic economists, dissent is negligible and controversy is far less important than it is commonly made out to be. To draw attention to disagreements between economists is to offer a distorted picture of what economics is about. Instead, they argue, the focus of attention should be on the enormous extent to which economists agree. From this perspective, dissent and controversy are not worth much attention. Another justification for studying controversy is that it is exciting. James Tobin once argued (explaining the appeal of Keynesian economics) that when you are young you like theoretical controversy: you like hearing about the good guys and the bad guys, and the idea of being on the side of progressive thought and against an encrusted orthodoxy. Similarly, historians are interested in dissent and controversy in much the same way that writers of thrillers are more interested in neighborhoods where murders happen than in ones where everyone just watches TV all day! What these answers have in common is that they associate controversy and dissent with the pathology of the subject. Disagreement is something to be avoided and which reflects badly on the profession. The most famous representative of this view was probably Alfred Marshall. In his attempt to establish economics as a science that carried authority with the public, he studiously refrained (most of the time) from entering into controversy, and he sought to reconcile within his own work divergent trends that were tearing apart the subject in other countries.