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>The very birth of the marginalist school was during a period of time when the workers movement adopted the classical labour theory of value as the substance to their claim of economic justice. To construct theory in a way as to present the economy as purely technical, striving to clear in general equilibrium under the neutral aucioneer that is the market, filled an ideological purpuse for capital as strong as Marxism did for their adversaries.

How is it related to the question?

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Is the labor theory of value true? No, it's not. It's bad historicizing, no amount of history can override that the labor theory of value is wrong.

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You present it the way that they did it to fight with workers. Is it right in any meaningful sense? Do you have any proof of this or is it about general thoughts about class interests?

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>My objection to neoclassical theory is not mainly that I dislike its political implications however, but that if you believe the economy to be a social entity, and driven, evolved and reproduced by contemporary relations of power, you can not find any answers to your questions about its motion using the neoclassical toolbox, because the theories was created to answer different types of questions (that is, questions stripped of social content).

Please present the concrete questions and people who answer them well, for our discussion they should be using quantitative methods. It's almost always handwaving and politically motivated stuff with some abstract narratives about global forces of history.

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For the note, economic historians generally work on political economies and quite a big part of economic history is about political structure of society.

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We can look at a star of New Institutional Economics, Acemoglu (I don't think that his stuff is really good, but it's a relevant example):

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Books:

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1. Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy --- Political economy
   
2. Why Nation Fail --- Political economy
   
3. The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty --- Political economy
   
   You can look at his recent articles:
   
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   https://scholar.google.hk/citations?hl=en&user=l9Or8EMAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
   
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   It's mostly about the economy being "social entity, and driven, evolved and reproduced by contemporary relations of power".
   
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   Are his answers bad for you? Why? Can you show people who answer his question better than him? Why they do it?
   
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   If you are not being fine with the notion of Acemoglu doing neoclassical economics, why do you think so?
   
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   >It is a bit ironical btw, that the theoretical framework that removed time as an analytical variable from the study of economics became the dominant methodology in the study of its history.
   
   Is your remark relevant? Does it make it wrong? In which way?
   
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   >Quantitatively, when suitable; qualitatively, when suitable, with a theoretical framework designed to answer the relevant social questions at hand, instead of a framework designed not to answer social questions at all.
   
   This is a non-answer. You don't answer about quantitative methods, you don't answer about theoretical frameworks. You are doing abstract handwaving on the topic.
   
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   >Quantitatively, when suitable; qualitatively, when suitable, with a theoretical framework designed to answer the relevant social questions at hand, instead of a framework designed not to answer social questions at all.
   
   We talk about economic history. The framework is designed to answer a question about the economy and it answers them quite well.
   
   The economy is a social question and people who did economics always were social scientists, neoclassicals are too, you engage in a weird redefinition.
   
   Why do you think that the majority of things in economic history journals are not social questions and/or why do you think that they are failing in answering them? Please, present examples.
   
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   >Anwar Shaikh, at The New School, is a good example of how you can write good, mathematically sophisticated, economic theory that is not neoclassical and therefor not ahistorical and asocial.
   
   Why do you think that he is good? What he has to do with economic history? What questions did he answer well?
   
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   From my point of view, his entire career is about misreading results in production functions, doing theoretical and empirical stuff from IO tables to prove LTV. He mostly has nothing to do with economic history.
   
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   I read Capitalism, Conflict, Crises. It's his magnum opus that compiles his results from his life and it's just a hodge-podge of badly fit together mostly theoretical stuff.
   
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   In which sense his theory is social in comparison with usual economic history? In which sense his theory is historical? I didn't see him citing almost anything related to economic history, only some time-series for badly done macroeconomics and stuff about interest rates. Talking about capitalists and workers in this particular way makes things historical and social? If you don't constantly talk about them or talk about them in a different way like in a majority of economic history papers, it's not social and historical anymore?
   
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   I don't understand why this is fine economic theory for you and why neoclassicals doing economic history is a garbage route that doesn't really tell you about how the economy was in general and why they should be replaced with a "proper historical method" there.
   
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   https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Competition-Conflict-Anwar-Shaikh/dp/0199390630
   
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   If you look at (post)-Marxist, for example, Sam Bowles did more with interesting things about societies and economies. But he is a usual neoclassical economist with a lot of work in game theory, microeconomics both in theory and in practice from labs to anthropological research.
   
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   Can you present people who do real quantitative history who are not neoclassical economists or related to them?
   
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   At this point, it looks that you are trying to disqualify economic historians from being real historians without a particularly good reason and calling the thing they do "a garbage route". There is no reason why qualitative people or anyone else are and would be better at answering questions about the economy than current economical historians. You don't present these reasons in a meaningful way outside very abstract construction not very connected to anything I can think about.

https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543

Been trying to remember this title.

Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton Economic History of the Western World) Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke.

It's written more at an academic level than at a popular audience. But it's an important look at what's been going on at the international level for the whole of the modern era.

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Plenty-Millennium-Princeton-Economic/dp/0691143277