Autobiographical memory and the historiography of economics

This essay recommends that historians of economics be cautious when using autobiographical materials, especially when those materials can be construed as projecting an individual’s history onto a larger historical narrative. It is not simply a matter that the materials may be unreliable in accidental or systematic ways. It is that the structure and nature of autobiographical memoirs are not unproblematic. They are written to some purpose we often do not understand, for an audience of non-historians. And they reflect a number of different issues from both the personal and cultural life scripts which they illuminate and which in turn shape and reflectively are shaped by exactly these kinds of accounts. As a consequence, we historians of economics understand too little of the autobiographical impulse and have too impoverished a vocabulary to provide interesting, let alone compelling, appraisals of its products. Scholars in history, psychology, sociology, literature, and medicine have begun to address these issues. We historians of economics should do likewise.

Duke Scholars

Author E. Roy Weintraub Economics