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A Note on Textual Editing: A Rejoinder to Young

In his review of Roy Harrod’s Collected Interwar Papers and Correspondence (Harrod 2003), Warren Young finds my editorial methodology to have focused on an “external” history (that is, that regarding “the institutional and personal history of a scientific discipline”) and having totally overlooked the “internal” history (that is, that based on “the intrinsic importance of contributions in the discipline as the basis for ‘take off’ into further self-sustained theoretical development”). The charge is that I failed, in both the editorial footnotes and in the introduction, to extensively refer to the subsequent literature on Harrodian themes: more specifically, Solow, Domar, and Baumol are cited only in passing or not at all, as well as the literature on the “Harrod-Domar model” and the resemblance of a note by Meade with his growth model published three decades later, on which instead Young’s own writings focused. In sum, I have denied “the reader of the economic context of the material [I have] presented” (Young 2005). Young thus thinks of context as the projection of ideas (or embryos of ideas) into the future. This implies that an interpretation of a text is given (or presupposed) in order to recognize similarities (with the benefit of hindsight or direct descent) between the original text and the later literature. I have not, indeed, followed such an editorial strategy. My approach, as expounded in the Editorial Introduction, relies instead on the praxis of scholarly textual editing developed by philologists with a rather different purpose in mind, on which perhaps it might be worthwhile to elaborate. In this view, the editor’s primary task is not that of interpreting the text in the light of what is known today or of following the influences it may have exerted, but that of making a corpus of texts accessible and understandable to the reader by adopting the viewpoint of the author, as if the reader were reading over the author’s shoulder and witnessing correspondence flowing in and out and essays being written and presented to an audience. In other words, the text is presented in its contemporary context, focusing on the circumstances under which it was written: the editor reconstructs the author’s intellectual universe. In this perspective, the above-mentioned distinction between internal and external focus is just not pertinent, for it refers to an author’s contribution to the history of the discipline whereas the editorial work consists in presenting the text as close as possible to the author’s original intention. This occasionally implies some amount of