INTRODUCTION

The 1970 Nobel laureate in Economics, Paul Samuelson, was a strong devotee of the so-called SMMS narrative of disciplinary development, whereby he sits at the apex of a lineage that passes uninterrupted through Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall (Feiwel 1982: 3). A series of advances are posited through which the best bits of the preceding theory were preserved in successive conciliatory syntheses, shorn of their troublesome features. “The giant steps that have been made in this narrative are steps of codifications of the body of knowledge”, writes Till Duppe (2011: 41) of Samuelson's approach to the history of economic thought. “The disagreements economists had with their predecessors did not have to be argued, but simply vanished in their recodification.” Samuelson was only too happy to assume the role of recodifier-in-chief, because the only justification for studying what economists once did, he said, is to understand how they were now doing the same thing better. He described his own approach through the “good, if ugly title [of] … ‘Presentistic history’” (Samuelson 1991: 6), as well as through the potentially better if definitely even less appealing “Cliowhiggism” (Samuelson 1987: 56). “Inside every classical writer”, he argued, “there is a modern economist trying to get born” (Samuelson 1992: 5). From this perspective, the person responsible for the last recodification must necessarily be best placed to speak on behalf of the whole subject field, both now and for everyone from the past who has helped it get to its current position.

The text that allowed Samuelson (1983a: xxvi) to claim the status of disciplinary standard-setter was his 1947 Foundations of Economic Analysis. Others have hardly been less stinting in their praise for it. Foundations has been described by luminaries within the profession as “a remarkable performance” (Fischer 1987: 236), “the most important book in economics since the war” (Kenneth Boulding, cited in Lucas 2001: 7), the text that “really formed [the successor] generation of economists” (Robert Solow, cited in Breit & Hirsch 2009: 156).