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The place for the teaching of and research dealing with the history of economics continues to draw attention, at least from within our speciality. Recent examples are the History of Political Economy mini-symposium (1992) that was anchored to Margaret Schabas's paper and Donald Walker's affirming essay in theJournal of the History of Economic Thought(1999). The former asked whether the history of economics, given the neglect shown by mainstream economics, should be incorporated into history of science programs. The latter argued that this neglect is unfortunate because there is a place for the history of economics in the training of economists. (The neglect is documented by Aslanbegui and Naples (1997).) An important feature of Walker's essay is that the argument was based on structural aspects of the discipline. His point of departure was Donald Gordon's (1965) claim that there is little in the history of economic analysis that facilitates the understanding of current economics and the research problems with which it is concerned. Certainly the education of natural scientists, as Gordon noted, is consistent with this claim. George Stigler (1969) made a similar claim, and both more or less took the conclusion to be self-evident. Walker's response was that, at least among a variety of important sub-disciplines, there is not professional consensus and, therefore, there may not be a sharp distinction between current and past theory. This suggests that some form of historical analysis may be useful. Walker's paper moved the discussion away from arguments that begin with the presumption that every educated economist should be versed in the origins of economics. Instead, he focused on questions relating to history as a tool for understanding and for doing today's economics. In this respect, Walker returned to an issue addressed by Filippo Cesarano (1983)—they both focused on historical studies as a source of illumination for current economic analysis.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed (Kuhn, 1962a, p. 1).Certain types of experimental findings serve as benchmarks, permanent facts about phenomena which any future theory must accommodate, and which in conjunction with comparable theoretical benchmarks, pretty permanently force us in one direction. … The remarkable fact about recent physical science is that it creates a new, collective, human artifact, by giving full range to three fundamental human interests, speculation, calculation, and experiment. By engaging in collaboration between the three, it enriches each in a way that would be impossible otherwise (Hacking, 1983, p. 248).