ECOINT Atelier

• Department of History
• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies

This atelier is part of the ERC-funded project ECOINT that explores the history of international economic thinking as it was shaped in the context of multilateral organisations in the 20th century.

This lecture will focus our discussion on how our writing can bring to life ideas and authors that have been neglected by the main accounts of the history of economic thought, as well as the challenges of doing this work.

We will draw on our in-progress work to address questions such as: How can we give coherence to a reconstituted set of ideas, works, and practices when their authors struggle against mechanisms of exclusion or work for anonymizing bureaucracies? When we as historians rehabilitate authors, ‘mid-level’ and ‘non-intellectual’ economic thinkers, what biographical illusions do we create? How can we ensure that we are sufficiently reflective when writing about people who had been made invisible by disciplinary practices in the past, including practices that we still keep? What is the status of authorship, for instance, when authors are invisibilised and marginalised outside the boundaries of legitimate knowledge production? How can we write histories that encompass of intellectual agency and labour when this can be hard to define? What kinds of transnational and interdisciplinary discussions are needed or required in order to produce anti-canons and counter-paradigms, or do we need new paradigms altogether?