I showed a draft of my presidential address to a friend the other day. He read for a few minutes, then looked up at me and said, “Your address will be remembered long after The Wealth of Nations, Ricardo's Principles, and The General Theory are all forgotten, but not until then!”

Remembering is what we who read, write, and teach history of economics are about. Historians preserve memory; we collect historical facts, organize them, and store them in conceptual filing systems. Remembering accurately and fully is hard work. Memory is tricky. It is always incomplete. It is well known that different witnesses to an event such as a traffic accident can remember the event quite differently, so that their accounts of what happened seem incompatible with each other. They may even appear not to be reports of the same event.

Something happened to economics in the decade of the 1950s that is little appreciated by most economists and even by professional historians of economic thought. The subject went through an intellectual revolution as profound in its impact as the so-called Keynesian Revolution of pre-war years. I call it the Formalist Revolution after Ward (1972, pp. 40–41), who was the first to recognize the profound intellectual transformation of economics in the years after World War II.

It has been almost fifteen years since Arjo Klamer and I published “The Making of an Economist” (1987), which described the graduate school experience of economics students at six top graduate schools. The students who responded to that survey are now in their late thirties and early forties, and hence are in the prime of their careers. This paper follows up on our earlier study; it reports the results of a survey that was sent to those respondents who voluntarily listed their names on the previous survey and said that they would be open to further contact. It is meant to capture the respondents' reflective views of the profession and their graduate school experience, along with how they have changed over the past fifteen years. To encourage participation, the survey was relatively short. To facilitate comparisons, it repeated a number of the questions asked in the previous survey. (Appendix A reproduces the survey.)

The first half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain was one of nearly continuous controversy over monetary issues. The Restriction of Cash Payments and the Bullion Controversy dominated the first two decades. After Resumption in 1821, a series of banking crises kept monetary issues on the front burner, until they boiled over again in the Currency-Banking Controversy of the 1840s. Of the many writers contributing to the monetary literature during the period, few contributed so much as Thomas Tooke. Long recognized as a collector of economic data without peer in his era, Tooke's reputation as an economic theorist has grown in recent years (cf. Laidler 1972; Arnon 1991; M. Smith 2001). Readers of Tooke's works have long known that his views on monetary theory changed radically from the 1820s to the 1840s, when he adopted a starkly anti-quantity theory approach. In his early years as a collector of economic data, Tooke allied himself with David Ricardo in the effort to return Great Britain to the gold standard. But though both subscribed to the quantity-theory/price-specie-flow-mechanism (QT-PSFM) framework for analyzing the economy's adjustment to monetary disturbances, their theoretical approaches differed in important respects. The differences were great enough to lead Arnon (1989, 1991) to conclude that Tooke and Ricardo should be viewed primarily as political, not theoretical, allies and to suggest that Tooke's approach shared greater affinities with the work of moderate bullionists than with Ricardo (Arnon 1991, pp. 48, 58, 108).

In economics as in anthropology, old artifacts spur continuing debates. A case in point is Knut Wicksell's 1898 analysis of the cumulative process of price inflation in pure credit, cashless economies. Some economists view Wicksell's model as a milestone in the evolution of quantity-theoretic monetary analysis inasmuch as it constitutes the seminal rigorous explanation of how loan-created stocks of bank money translate interest rate differentials into price level changes. Others, however, dispute this point and instead argue that money plays no role in determining price level changes in Wicksell's model.

The development of Austrian economics in the interwar period was marked by the contrast between its high esteem at the beginning of the 1930s and its dwindling influence throughout the remainder of the decade. A variety of reasons have been conjectured for this decline (and the eventual dissolution) of the Austrian school of economics (see Caldwell 1988, pp. 517–21). A rarely mentioned factor of a more sociological nature that may have contributed to or that at least indicated the school's decline was its loss of coherence during the late 1930s, when, as a consequence of the emigration of the most prominent members, Vienna lost its role as the Austrian school's main center of communication. Insofar as this lack of coherence led not just to diversity within a unifying framework but to crucial divergences among the school's leading members, this might help to explain why after 1945 the Austrians were no longer perceived as a distinct school—some parts of their thinking had been fused into the neoclassical mainstream and others had largely fallen into disregard.