On Writing Roman Economic History

Abstract

History-writing is a subjective art. The historian is an agent – an individual who selects, arranges, interprets and emplots a series of ‘facts’ within a narrative determined, whether consciously or subconsciously, by ideology. There is a fundamental difference between the past – events which empirically occurred in physical, temporal reality – and what historical theorist Hayden White calls “the historical past” – “a construction and only a highly selective version of the past.” Even the historical ‘facts’ themselves – the building blocks of historiography – are inescapably subjective, even intangible. Neville Morley pithily observes “a fact is a verbal statement, an idea, with no empirical existence outside people’s minds.” Although not all historians are willing to embrace such a deconstructionist or otherwise broadly postmodern dissonance between ‘history’ and ‘the past’, there is broad agreement in the mainstream of the discipline that history-writing is a process of argumentation, interpretation and weighing plausibilities. History-writing, therefore, cannot be called ‘objective’. Not so with many of the theories of modern economics – a result of many developments, but especially the early twentieth century’s distinction between ‘value-free’ (wertfrei) and ‘normative’ economics as well as the widespread adoption of Chicago School economist Milton Friedman’s concept of “positive economics” in the s. Now central within the overarching methodology of modern economics is the idea that economic propositions are ‘testable’ in the same way as scientific statements about the natural world. Economic propositions – accompanied scientificsounding terminology – hold the status of hypotheses which can and must