It is far from easy to decide, at any given moment, whether the state of a particular branch of intellectual inquiry is to be described as healthy or unhealthy, as full of promise or stagnant and moribund. The criteria of advance are not clear and personal bias may distort judgment. Development seems to take place not in a smooth upward trend but in a series of discontinuous steps. What seems at first sight to be a period of inactivity or even decline may on a longer view turn out to be merely a necessary pause preparatory to further growth. Anyone undertaking to appraise the present state of an intellectual discipline such as economic history must therefore be aware that his task is a hazardous one.

There is no scarcity of evidence to suggest that economic history is at present in critical condition, at least in the United States. Traditionally tied to both history and economics and called upon to meet the expectations of each, it has always led a somewhat precarious existence. At least since the First World War its relationship to economic theory, always debatable, has become tenuous, until today it is a common experience to find in the same university department economic historians who know little economic theory and find no use for what they do know, and economic theorists who know little history and have no interest in learning more. This alienation has proceeded far beyond the normal differences of emphasis that might be expected to exist between specialists in the inductive and the deductive methods. Economic theory today, in most of its branches, neither draws on economic history for its data nor goes to economic history for empirical verification. Economic history, for its part, commonly uses only the crudest of the tools in the economist's tool-box, and displays almost complete indifference to the refinements in analytical methods that occupy the theorist's working time. The consequences of this divorce have been unfortunate for economic history. Some would say they have been unfortunate for economic theory also.