Since I’ve been doing much the same thing as this blogger in an effort to understand the history of economic thought, I have also noticed this phenomenon while reading Polanyi, Keynes, Smith and others.

My larger point comes from reading a lot of the very early anthropological literature of the late nineteenth century. In particular I’m intrigued by the writings of Sir Henry Maine on the history of ancient laws and the development of ancient institutions, and of course Lewis Henry Morgan, the “father” of anthropology. The more I read from this time period (as well as from the 1970’s) the more I’m convinced that they had everything already pretty much already figured out, and a lot of modern scholarship is just restating or rediscovering what they already knew but has been forgotten or deliberately obscured in the interest of keeping people from questioning the status quo.

Most of the ideas in economics and quite a few other later fields being “discovered” now were well-known to early political economists, historians and sociologists. All of that academic effort and history was excised and suppressed over the years, so much so that it now feels novel and fresh despite it being (correctly) taken for granted for around 100 years or so.

Reading Polanyi — who was drawing on much earlier histories — makes this abundantly clear.