Samuelson's ghosts: Whig history and the reinterpretation of economic theory

Over a quarter of a century has passed since the 1987 publication of Paul A. Samuelson’s historiographical manifesto ‘Out of the closet: A program for the Whig history of economic science’, summarising arguments that had developed during a 16-year debate provoked by his 1971Journal of Economic Literature article on the Marxian transformation problem. Samuelson’s intervention marked a defining turning point in the evolution of contemporary economic thought. In the wake of the economic turmoil that opened with the 2007 financial crash, 20 years after Samuelson’s manifesto, criticisms of the quality of economic thought have multiplied. This special issue of Cambridge Journal of Economics offers a timely re-appraisal of the impact of the Whig-historical programme on the economic thinking and practices that have become the target of today’s critics. The term ‘Whig history’ was originally coined by the English historian Herbert Butterfield (1981 [1931]) to refer to what Peter Boettke (2005) describe as ‘history as written by those perceived to have been the intellectual victors of key debates’. Butterfield’s largely successful purpose was to discredit and eliminate the practice, amongst historians, of presenting the past and its ideas as nothing more than an imperfect form of the present. Since then, awareness of the dangers of such reductionism and the necessity of what Bagchi (2014) calls a ‘contextual’ approach to social knowledge has spread through most of the social sciences.