EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Theory and Measurement of Influence in the History of Economic Thought

Peter R. Senn

Chapter 2. in Political Economy, Linguistics and Culture, 2008, pp 15-43 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Despite the fact that the study of influence is the central task of the historian of economic thought, there is no generally accepted theory of influence either in the social sciences or in the history of economic thought. Foundational methodological issues such as influence on what and by what means and tracing and measuring influence are the subjects of this paper. The paper is both a commentary on the present understanding of influence in the history of economic thought and a prolegomenon to a more general theory of influence in the history of economic thought. It focuses on how the ideas that make up the corpus of economics are transmitted from one economist to the other. The conclusion is that no general theory of influence for the history of economic thought is possible at the present time. A general theory may never be possible because different scholars will probably continue to interpret the term “influence” differently.

Keywords: General theory of influence in the history of economic thought; influence; economic theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:euhchp:978-0-387-73372-2_2

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9780387733722

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-73372-2_2

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:spr:euhchp:978-0-387-73372-2_2