Intellectual History and the History of Economic Thought: A Personal View (Essay‪)‬

Section 1 With apologies for resorting to acronyms from the outset, my subject is the relationship between the history of economic thought (HET) and intellectual history (IH). I shall treat them as separate entities, despite my belief that they can be cultivated in harmony with one another. My opinions on this derive from personal experience in first making the journey from one to the other and then by working as an intellectual historian on the borderline between economics, politics and the moral or social sciences, roughly between 1750 and the middle of the twentieth century. I stress the personal in what follows because I am not sure how far my historiographic preferences can be described as exemplary. At my age, too, it is no longer safe to assume that the formative influences on my work are going to be familiar to an audience coming to the subject with shorter memories and newer perspectives.