B00 - History of Economic Thought, Methodology, and Heterodox Approaches: GeneralReturn

This paper surveys some ongoing changes in the historiography of economics. I argue that there is a close connection between a decline of prescriptive economic methodologies based on the positivist philosophy of science and the emerging tendency to write history of economics in a non-Whig way. This "new history" uses historical rather than rational reconstruction method of narration and draws heavily on recent works in sociology of scientific knowledge, science studies, literary theory and general historiography of science. I present main features of this approach as exemplified in some recent works concerned with the influence of mathematics and natural sciences on the history of twentieth-century economics.