Why past intellectual ideas must be acknowledged as lighthouses for the future

Especially when an economic crisis occurs, such as the last big crisis in 2008, contemporaries tend to question belief systems including academic systems of knowledge. Paradigms evolve to become a subject of inquiry. One of those new topics is a call to increasingly acknowledge history of economic thought (HET) as an important, although neglected, domain of economic inquiry. During the last decades, HET has mostly been abolished and has disappeared in many contemporary teaching curricula in economics. An unforecasted crisis teaches us the lesson that our academic understanding may be incomplete. However, can we learn anything by reading the HET literature? The answer is that HET makes current debates less sterile because it embeds the matter into a flux of changing paradigms. Many brilliant argumentations exist hinting to the fact that HET has to be interpreted as a permanent process of academic failures by which we can learn about directions for new knowledge. The paper will primarily argue with Joseph A. Schumpeter who dealt in detail with the question of why and how to deal with historiography as a tool for conducting proper economics study in his substantial introduction to the History of Economic Analysis (1954). Fundamentally this process does not differ from analogous processes in other fields of knowledge but “much more than in, say, physics is it true in economics that modern problems, methods, and results cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of how economists have come to reason as they do. In addition, much more than in physics have results been lost on the way or remained in abeyance for centuries” (Schumpeter 1954, 6). Given these insightful instructions by Schumpeter as a plea for increased, or at least continuous, attempts to invest in the history of economics, one also has to consider Schumpeter’s writings as a good example of what the history of economic writings can highlight.