The History of Economics Unbound. 2025. Edited by Philippe Fontaine and Joel Isaac. Supplement to volume 57 of HOPE. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
"The History of Economics: Decline or Renewal?," by Philippe Fontaine and Joel Isaac (pp. 1-41). In important respects, the history of economics thrives as never before—only now it is written as much by historians and social scientists without formal training in economics as it is by economists who specialize in the study of past ideas.
"The History of Economics as Science Critique: Demystification and Its Limits," by Erik Baker (pp. 45-77). For economists, like other scientists, being scientific does not entail access to value-neutrality or methodological infallibility but is structured by contingent and questionable metaphors, conceptual schemes, and paradigms; consists of conventional practices that reshape as well as reflect the world; and is engaged in struggles to secure professional prestige and authority.
"When an Accountant Becomes a Taxi Driver: Unemployment, Labor Market Institutions, and Economic Theory," by Aaron Benanav (pp. 81-109). Economic theories of unemployment evolved in response to—and helped interpret—ongoing changes in labor market structures, even as the categories economists relied on obscured key aspects of those transformations.
"The Growth Concept, Decolonization, and the Global Cold War: A Study of Economic Ideas and Twentieth-Century International History," by Stephen Macekura (pp. 111-40). Bringing together histories of economic thought with twentieth-century international history, this article shows that interrelated structural changes of the international system during and after World War II—global decolonization, the ossifying bipolarity of the Cold War world, and the maintenance of US global hegemony—created the conditions for the growth concept to gain a broader political purchase.
"Money Talks: The Rise of Willingness to Pay Without Apology," by Eli Cook (pp. 141-74). Far from being a foregone conclusion, economists started to embrace willingness-to-pay as a foundational measure of subjective value, efficiency, and welfare only in the 1970s, when they began to downplay inequality.
"The 'Social Rate of Discount' and the Political Economy of the Future in Postwar America," by William Deringer (pp. 175-219). The social rate of discount emerged as an object of social-scientific and political concern in the 1960s United States, propelled by debates about water infrastructure, and it surged into significance because it attracted the intellectual, ideological, and political interests of a disparate network of actors.
"The Postindustrial Politics of Productivity: Structures and Statistics of the Service Transition in the Long 1970s," by Simon Torracinta (pp. 221-55). As the US economy transitioned from manufacturing to services, economists began to interrogate the problem of productivity through a statistical and, more compellingly, a structural lens, drawing primarily on William J. Baumol's famous theory of the 'cost disease.'"
"Straight Outta Princeton: Toward a Theory of Gary Becker," by Jonny Bunning (pp. 259-99). Where existing accounts rely on textual, individualist, or ideological theories, the article places archival evidence in dialogue with approaches from the history of science to suggest that Becker's approach is better explained by accounting for the mundane elements necessary for a career in mid-century economics.