As many of you may know, the HET Website was constructed by myself ( Gonçalo Fonseca) in a burst of youthful energy many years ago It was hosted for a long time on a faculty server at the New School for Social Research. It subsequently jumped around through other servers, and then went down for a while. Well, now it is back again, at a new URL address:
The HET website will be here for a while, so you can update your bookmarks.
While it has been considerably revamped, its mission remains the same.
The HET website is a repository of collected links and information on the history of economic thought, from the ancient times until the modern day. It is designed for students and the general public, who are interested in learning about economics from a historical perspective.
The HET website it not an online textbook nor a reference encyclopedia. I like to think of it as a “link tank”, pointing students and researchers to online resources on economic theory. I have just organized these links in a manner which is both entertaining and educational.
The material is organized through three main navigation channels:
- Alphabetical Index of individual economist profiles,via
- Schools of Thought (loosely defined)
- A series of Essays and Surveys on specific topics
When I originally set it up, the available resources online on the history of economics were relatively scarce, with a few invaluable depositories, such as the McMaster Archive set up by Roderick Hay. Online materials have greatly expanded since, with Googlebooks, Archive.org, Gallica, etc. The new version of the HET Website incorporates materials from these new sources.
I am still in the process of reviewing and revising every page and checking that every link works, that deprecated links are updated or removed, and new links added. It is still an on-going process, and some stray old links have yet to be fixed, so I ask for patience.
As always, the HET website maintains a strict policy of linking only to online resources which are freely available to everyone, academic and non-academic. It does not link to works behind paywalls or institutional restrictions, nor to commercial sites, nor sites requiring complicated registrations, etc.
Rather than give preference to a particular online source, and swamp you with seas of blue, I have decided to pile the links to all the online versions available of a text via “codes” at the end of the title. e.g. [bk], [av], [bnf], [js], [McM], [lib], and so on. This maximizes the sources for an article or book (in case you have a preference for one format or another). Because scholars are a finicky bunch, I have made the extra effort to track down the original facsimile version of an article or book. Where a book has multiple editions, I have tried to find links to every edition available.
Of course, the HET website is not merely a resource for specialist scholars. It also serves as a guide to introduce more general researchers, teachers, students and the interested public to economics and its history.
I owe gratitude to INET for persuading me to revive the HET website as well as providing support for doing so. New economic thinking, they reminded me, begins by remembering past economic thinking.
I hope you enjoy the new HET website. There are now over 1,000 economist profiles, 100 schools of thought and some 50+ surveys of topics with links to tens of thousands of online books and articles. This is an on-going project, there still remains much to be revised, profiles and essays to be completed and new content to be added, so keep checking back.
