How do historians deal with presentism, in terms of conceptual frameworks, coloring their views of history?

You touch on a very important issue any study of history will have to deal with – how do we avoid anachronistically imbuing our analysis and understanding with modern concepts? Whether it’s something to do with religion, the ‘nation’ – as your description suggests – or even something as fundamental as concepts of time, the family, or our relationship with the body, there seems to be a gulf that we can only partially access. What’s helped me a bit in my study of economic and political developments is to trace various intellectual and conceptual genealogies: that is to say, the more we’re aware how the concept of the economy, nation etc. has evolved over time, under what and whose influences and at what points in time, the better equipped we are to avoid projecting back into the past ahistorical, more contemporaneous modes of thinking. There are also caveats to do with changing language that are certainly relevant here, and in some cases, more anthropologically-informed approaches towards culture evolves also enrich our understanding of how concepts like power or ‘tradition’ evolve over time.

Take the idea of the economy. Timothy Mitchell has argued in the mid-1990s that what we think of as the ‘economy’ today – a kind of nationally-bounded, measurable and representable entity, a “self-contained structure or totality of relations of production, distribution and consumption of goods and services within a given geographical space” is actually a remarkably recent formulation dating to about World War II. This literature on the “invention of the economy” is not to say that nothing economic has been going on in the millennia prior, but that the word has significantly different connotations. Adam Smith might then be better read as a moral or political philosopher, who uses economy to mean ‘frugality’ or ‘prudence’. Consider this quote:

“Capital has been silently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good conduct of individuals. ... It is the highest impertinence and presumption...in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the oeconomy of private people”.

This is scarcely the meaning of economy today, for the political economy of 18th-century study is chiefly concerned with the circulation of goods within a state (akin to the household circulation within a monarchy), and in the following century (e.g in Ricardo’s trade theory) political economy also focuses on geographies of settlement. The preoccupation of Smith and Ricardo with corn is not some humorous choice or an easily-substitutable agricultural example, but point to a conception of economic activity grounded in tangible time and space. Reading and contextualizing these situations begins to look quite necessary.

Avoiding presentism becomes a little less difficult when we trace specific geneaologies, whether rooted in individual thinkers (as humans responding to and drawing from their environment) or the individual concept. The remarkable absence of the economy ‘as we know it today’ that Mitchell points out does not suggest some deep irrationality or an obstruction to modernity rooted in narrow-mindedness. Names familiar in economic history are theorizing about the economy – Karl Polanyi’s idea of a capitalist ‘double movement’, or John Maynard Keynes - are writing in the earlier part of the 20th century, but equally important are epistemic and intellectual models. Phillip Mirowski has cleverly eludicated the complex relationship between economics and physics: economics drew on the latter for provides some causal models and quantitative methods of analysis, and even economic metaphors rely heavily on understandings of energy and information. The development of computational theory and computers themselves also exert a heavy influence on how we think of the economy that tend towards the institutional – markets are tantamount to enormous information processors, economic agents become self-interested computers.

Even visual representations of the economy have much to tell us – a very recent article from Gabor Biro looks at the first ever ‘economics’ film, made none by none other than Michael Polanyi. Chiefly about the circulation of money rather than on production and consumption proper, the film’s contents points to an increasing level of abstraction, but the existence of the film itself suggest that the economy was also something that needed to be taught and transmitted. Narrowing this view of the ‘economic’ down to a specific period of the mid-20th century helps tease out how the idea of the ‘economy’ and the discipline of economics itself is slowly produced and reified, something that can of course be done with the later period – for instance, how do ideas of (economic) value come to be embedded in university degrees, or how, why and when was it that the regulation of the international economy came to be the powerful imperative it was? How did corporations come to be understood as ‘people’?

Many economists themselves greatly underplay the modern origins of their disciplines, which in itself begins to look like a kind of presentism itself. I hope to have shown, even if briefly, how unpacking the evolution of a concept by paying attention to its earlier historical usage might work. Where intellectual history shines is by paying attention to ideas themselves: by de-mystifying them, revealing them to be contingent developments rather than essential, super-organic realities that can be superimposed anytime and anywhere.