As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the History of Economics Society (HES), this issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought marks a significant milestone. The journal, as the official publication of the society, seeks to participate in commemorating this important occasion and acknowledging the society’s substantial contributions to the scholarly community over the past five decades. The society’s efforts have not only advanced research in the history of economic thought but have also fostered a vibrant intellectual community of historians and economists.

Beginning in the 1960s, subfields claimed a central place in the production and dissemination of economic knowledge. Generalists were replaced by economists who specialized in the study of international economics, public economics, labor economics, or econometrics. New infrastructure emerged, including field-specific societies and field-specific journals (Backhouse and Cherrier 2017; Cherrier 2017; Cherrier and Rebours 2023; Desmarais-Tremblay, Johnson, and Sturn 2023; Desmarais-Tremblay and Svorenčik 2021; Svorenčik 2021). Some of the earliest movers were those interested in social choice and the political economy of governance. In 1963, a coalition of economists and political economists established the Committee for Non-Market Decision Making; a preliminary conference led to the creation of the Public Choice Society, an annual conference, and a specialized journal, Public Choice (Buchanan 2003; Medema 2011).1 Public Choice was quickly followed by the Journal of Human Resources (1965), the Journal of Economic Education (1969), the Journal of International Economics (1971), the Journal of Public Economics (1972), the Journal of Econometrics (1973), the Journal of Urban Economics (1974), the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (1974), and the Journal of Comparative Economics (1977), all attached to newly formed societies and associations.

I attended the now famous conferences at Sussex in 1968 and Nottingham in 1969 that preceded the later founding of both the History of Economic Thought Society in the UK and the History of Economics Society (HES) in North America. In 1969, I also helped to found the UK Money Study Group at its first conference in Hove, while in 1970 I was at Karl Brunner’s first Konstanz Seminar. In both fields, these conferences were followed by many, many more. At that time new specialist journals were also appearing. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (JMCB), where I had a paper in the second issue, started life in 1969. So did History of Political Economy (HOPE), but there I had nothing to submit. Ironically, given Lionel Robbins’s still notorious attack on this proposed journal at Sussex, to which I shall return below, my first completed research paper in history of economic thought (HET)—on Thomas Tooke (Laidler 1972)—was already committed to his forthcoming Festschrift.

This paper outlines my own career within the History of Economics Society, my contributions to the society, and its central importance to my research endeavours. It is impossible for me to imagine having the career I have had without the HES, and my own case highlights how the society functioned to mentor and develop my academic career. This mentoring function is, in my view, the society’s most important, and one that has become only more vital in the face of the declining interest in the area within mainstream economics departments in the US, Canada, and the UK.

I defended my doctoral dissertation on stochastic stability of general equilibrium systems in Penn’s Applied Mathematics program in fall 1968. That year I began teaching math for economists, mathematical economics, microeconomics, and even econometrics at Rutgers College, where I remained for a couple of years before moving to Duke. At Rutgers I saw that graduate students took required courses in micro, macro, statistics, math, and econometrics, and there were electives in other fields like public finance and economic history. I didn’t know that there was any subdiscipline, or field, called the history of economic thought.

My first acquaintance with the History of Economics Society (HES) occurred in the summer of 1990 when I attended its seventeenth annual meeting. Organized by the then HES president and now recently deceased Stanley “Todd” Lowry at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, it marked the beginning of my experience with US higher education. Later that summer, I began a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University. The economics department still hosted a history of economics seminar—the Kress seminar—though its actual connection with the seminar was tenuous.1 Following the Lexington meeting, the paper I presented was accepted for publication in volume 7 of Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought—a book series that published selected papers from the HES conference. It was my first publication in English. From then on, I kept attending the HES annual meeting regularly and with enthusiasm. I met a number of stimulating people and made some good friends there. It was always refreshing to find myself in the United States following nine months of teaching and research in France.

The celebration of fifty years of the History of Economics Society (HES) is a wonderful achievement. It is a pity that the majority of the founding members are not alive to see this landmark. The initial seeds were planted in 1968, with a gathering run by Donald Winch at the University of Sussex, and watered the following year by A. W. “Bob” Coats at the University of Nottingham, who produced the first British History of Economic Thought newsletter. These meetings, and discussions at the annual meetings of the Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA), prompted the formation of the journal History of Political Economy (HOPE), with the first issue appearing in the spring of 1969.1 The idea of forming the HES was seriously broached in Chicago in 1973, and the first official meeting was held in Chapel Hill (North Carolina) the following year, although HES had already mounted four sessions in New York City at the 1973 ASSA meetings.

The task given to me for this issue was to discuss the history, challenges, and accomplishments of the History of Economics Society (HES) as I see them from my vantage point as a past president. I frame my remarks in terms of changes I believe have occurred in how our field has been pursued in the society since I became involved.

In what follows, I use stylized facts derived from my own professional career as a member of the History of Economics Society (HES) and the history of economics (HE) community to document and illustrate the changing context of the subdiscipline over the past three decades.1 In the 1990s, the subdiscipline was comprised of a number of national communities. Among the latter the North American community held a dominant position and was quite different from its continental European counterparts, the French and Italian in particular.2 Not only were its academic culture and environment much more competitive but they were also more open to non-disciplinary history of economics.3 Over the past two decades, however, the growing domination of the continental European community has created a new context in which the identity of the North American community in general and that of the HES in particular has become uncertain.

Recently, I participated in the thesis defense on an eminently local subject, political economic writing in the eighteenth century in the cantons of Vaud (where I live and teach) and Berne (which at the time had occupied the Canton of Vaud) in Switzerland. I will spare you the details of this 700-pages-thick thesis, with an appendix of another 200 pages, which was not even about political economic writing in all of the Swiss Federation, but only in these two small regions in one of the most beautiful spots of Europe. But I became mesmerized by the profoundness of the political economic thinking of a group of now largely forgotten administrators and members of the Swiss socio-economic elite that grappled with questions of how to position their economic doings against a Europe that was plagued by the early eighteenth-century War of Succession, questions about the economic consequences not of population growth but of population decline, and the consequences of what David Hume has characterized so well as the “Jealousy of Trade” between the emerging European colonial empires. More in particular, these local men of politics and power were concerned with if and how they could preserve the agricultural system of common pastures—that were to figure prominently in Elinor Ostrom’s early studies of the “commons”—or whether they should copy the English model of enclosures that seemed to promise agricultural innovation and economic growth. How would this pan out for the means of existence of the local population? And, of course, what would this mean for their own economic and political interests and standing? All these concerns brought them in conversation with the work of such writers as François Forbonnais, Richard Cantillon, the Physiocrats, and Scottish philosophers such as Hume, James Steuart, and Adam Smith, with some of whom they were also in correspondence. The measures the local elites implemented on the basis of these discussions were consequential for such important issues as land use, manufacture and commerce, and poor relief. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the thesis was supervised by one of Istvan Hont’s students, Béla Kapossy, a professor in the history department of the University of Lausanne.

I first visited the United States in September 1980 when I spent two weeks at the New School for Social Research in New York. The main reason was the first personal meeting with Adolph Lowe (1893–1995), with whom I had been in close contact since spring 1977 when I got my PhD in economics from the University of Kiel. Lowe had built up a new department for research on business cycles and international statistical economics at the Kiel Institute of World Economics since April 1926, which soon acquired an international reputation (Hagemann 2021). The group included such outstanding economists as Gerhard Colm, Hans Neisser, Fritz (Frank) Burchardt, and for some years also Wassily Leontief and Jacob Marschak. None of them remained in Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933. Lowe had moved to the Goethe University in Frankfurt in October 1931, where he was dismissed after three semesters. Like many other émigré economists, he first went to Great Britain (Hagemann 2007), where he became an honorary lecturer in economics and political philosophy at the University of Manchester. In summer 1940 he moved further to New York where the Graduate Faculty of the New School had been founded as the “University in Exile” by Alvin Johnson, and Emil Lederer became the founding dean in 1933.1 Thus, in contrast to Colm, Lowe, as well as his lifelong friend Marschak (both were supervisors of Franco Modigliani’s New School PhD thesis) and Neisser were not members of the Mayflower generation.

The History of Economics Society (HES)—together with its Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET)—has played an important role in my activities as a historian of economic thought, from my early exciting days as a graduate student in 1994–95 to my term as HES president in 2016–17, and beyond. As I join the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the HES, I would like to offer some historiographic perspectives on its history as based mostly on my shared memories and personal trajectory. My first participation at a HES conference took place in 1994, when I presented a paper in the history of macroeconomics. Those meetings were presided, at Babson College (Boston), by Laurence Moss, who used the “Perlman system” of paper presentation by the discussants followed by reactions by the authors. I was lucky to have Bradley Bateman as my discussant. Brad kindly agreed with the argument of my paper about Frederick Barnard Hawley’s anticipation of John Maynard Keynes’s principle of effective demand, published two years later in the History of Political Economy (HOPE).

I began as the secretary/treasurer for the History of Economics Society (HES) in 1999. Prior to my appointment, I had attended one conference and really didn’t know much about the society. My colleague Jim Wible (who was an active member) asked me if I would be interested and essentially pushed my name forward (there probably were not any other takers at the time). I was handed a paper ledger, a notebook of minutes, another collection of materials that were passed down from president to president, and $50,000 in bank deposits.

The History of Economics Society (HES) is neither the oldest nor the largest academic society of historians of economic thought.1 However, no one would deny—certainly not when celebrating its fiftieth anniversary—the vital role the HES has had in establishing and shaping the field of history of economics. The goal of this paper is to go beyond mere favorable impressions to an evidence-based history grounded in analyzing the attendees of the exploratory conference in 1973 and the fifty annual HES meetings that followed.

Attending the annual HES conferences is a fantastic learning experience. In this personal testimony I try to explain the reasons for this enthusiasm, around three fundamental aspects: the innovations and changes in the historiographical field of the history of economics, the informal governance of a dynamic community, and the relevance of methodological pluralism as a guide for research development.

The History of Economics Society (HES) has traveled a long way throughout its fifty conferences, from the first one organized by Warren Samuels and Vincent Tarascio on May 30 and 31, 1973, in Chicago, to the fiftieth annual meetings that took place on June 23 to 25, 2023, in Vancouver, Canada. This journey can be analyzed in different ways, and here we focus on the presidential addresses delivered as a guide to our analysis. From the conference programs we identified a total of forty-four presidential addresses: the first to appear on the conference program was Vincent Tarascio’s speech on Vilfredo Pareto, on the second day of the Boston conference in 1975. Since 1975, presidential addresses have become a regular feature of the conference, with rare exceptions such as the 1977 Irvine, CA, conference or in the recent years when Marcel Boumans’s presidential address was postponed from 2020 to 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Of the forty-four presidential addresses in the history of HES, we analyzed the forty-one that were published in scholarly journals (see Table 1). However, we could not find whether two presidential addresses—specifically Joseph Spengler, HES conference 1976, Chicago; and Carl Uhr, HES conference 1978, Toronto—have been published. Moreover, Robert Leonard has not published the address he delivered at the 2015 HES conference but two related papers.

The History of Economics Society (HES) initiated the History of Economics Society Bulletin (HESB) in 1979. Discussed at the 1978 meetings of the HES, the HESB was first conceived of as something “less” than History of Political Economy (HOPE)—i.e., an academic journal with a defined editorial line—but also “more” than just a newsletter for HES members (Caldwell 2021; Vaughn, this issue). Edited by Karen E. Vaughn (1979 to 1983) and William O. Thweatt (1984 to 1989), the HESB began by publishing short notes and abstracts of papers presented at the annual meetings of the HES. Research articles (i.e., peer-reviewed documents) appeared for the first time in 1988 and book reviews in 1989. A year after, the HESB became the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET), a full-fledged society journal under the editorship of Donald Walker (1990 to 1998). First published directly by its editor and the HES, the JHET started producing four yearly issues in 1998 under contract with Carfax as publisher. Carfax was eventually purchased by Taylor & Francis (Medema, this issue), and a new contract was signed with Cambridge University Press, both during Steven Medema’s editorship (1999 to 2008).1

In 1978, the Executive Committee of the History of Economics Society voted to begin publishing the HES Bulletin to serve as a regular means of communication among members. It was intended to include short notes, research inquiries, and reports about events important to Society members. Karen Vaughn of George Mason University was its first editor, a position she held until 1983. During those years, the content grew too include, in addition to notes and research inquiries, reports on the annual meeting, abstracts of papers presented, and publication of the annual Presidential and Distinguished Scholar Addresses. In 1983, the editorship passed on the William Thweat who expanded the content to include more scholarly papers, leading the way to the eventual establishment of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

In this article, Steven Medema provides some reflections on his tenure as editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (1999 – 2008). This was a time of significant transition in the life of the journal, and the successful navigation of this period provides an excellent illustration of how much an editor and a journal rely on the assistance and support of both key individuals and the broader community of scholars in the field.

A personal account of their experiences by Marcel Boumans and Evelyn Forget as JHET editors of issues 31 (1) to 35 (4).