History of Economic Thought in the Labyrinth of Historiographical Approaches

Abstract

The article attempts to trace the metamorphoses that the domestic historiography of economic science has undergone from perestroika to the present day. The “paradigm of replacement” adopted by the supporters of perestroika, together with the “water” of ideology and presentism of orthodox Marxism, also splashed out the “child” — the methodological principles of historicism and empiricism, forcing historiography to follow in the wake of the approaches of the Western “mainstream”. Having fallen, along with the latter, into the trap of presentism of the “history of economic analysis”, having experienced the “loss of institutional viability”, historiography (more precisely, what was left of it) at the end of the road found refuge in the symbolic reality of “intellectual history”. True, at the cost of losing not only historicism, but also disciplinary identity (economic orientation) and its scientific character. As a result of the study, the author comes to the conclusion that the return of the lost methodological principles of historical realism and empiricism, interest in the content of economic knowledge and its analysis will be facilitated by turning to the historical-scientific historiographic approach, which not only follows the standards of professional historical science, but and using a dictionary, as well as theoretical models of the sociology of scientific knowledge, which set the conceptual framework for historical and scientific studies.