How to study the political use of economic ideas? Reinventing a tradition in the history of economic thought

The relationship between economic ideas and public policy is a popular topic in the history of economics. Despite the massive literature on economists as policy advisers, or economists in parliament, historians of economic thought do not seem to have a common toolbox to examine how economic ideas are used in the political arena. This is surprising, because crafting such tools was already part of research programmes on the “history of thought and policy” advanced by leading figures of the discipline like William Grampp, Bob Coats, Donald Winch or Jean-Claude Perrot, from the 1960s to the 1990s. All of them put special emphasis on the process through which economic ideas are remodelled in the course of legislative and administrative processes. Despite the many works about the dissemination of economic knowledge, the sociological trend emerging in the field during the 1980s has deviated the attention of historians of economics away from the political terrain. While many contributions made in this framework could be useful to follow how ideas travel across the policy process, most of them were not applied to focus on the translation of economic ideas into political discourse. Getting back to the perspectives laid down by Grampp, Coats, Winch and Perrot could help to set the guidelines for such a study, and to outline the specific contribution historians of economic thought would make, articulated to other inputs coming from the sociology of science, the sociology of expertise or the history of political ideas.