The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics Online

Attention was paid to the history of economic thought (HET) by pioneers of economics such as Dupont de Nemours and Adam Smith. Classical economists like J.R. McCulloch in the 19th century used HET to establish a canon of economic literature, and their successor marginalists such as William Stanley Jevons to demonstrate progress in the subject. From the First World War until the 1960s, leading economists, from Jacob Viner to Wesley Mitchell, employed HET to cast light on current research. In the 1970s HET became a separate sub-discipline with its own periodicals and meetings. The number of scholars who worked in HET did not decline, even though the major research and postgraduate training centres lost interest.