The Historical Epistemology of Economics: An Invitation

What does the emergence of the craft of clockmaking in eighteenth-century France have to do with an empiricist notion of reasoning? What does the fascination with maps and cartography in Victorian Britain have to do with what all economics students learn today, the shifting of curves? Why is the fact that the winter in Germany 1946 turned out less harsh than expected related to the success of one kind of statistical evidence over another? And what does the interior design of a home in California in the 1970s tell us about the axiomatic method in economics? These are questions that surface in the essays that follow and that situate concerns about economic evidence and reasoning in time and place. They are the kind of questions that are nowadays considered the bread and butter of what goes under the label of historical epistemology.