Bringing them alive

This paper continues an ongoing reflection on the ways we do the history of economic thought, marked some decades ago by Mark Blaug. It offers a non-canonical typology comprising three alternative approaches, distinguished on the basis of the way they conceive of the link between statements, old and contemporary: the extensive, the retrospective, and the intensive approaches. It shows that the latter potentially challenges contemporary knowledge by introducing statements which do not belong to it. Despite its being a heuristic, it appears as a privileged route by which the history of economic thought can begin to engage with economic theory.