David Henderson had the following blog post today at Economic Liberty

On a short blog post today, Daniel Kuehn, preparing to teach an undergraduate course in the history of economic thought, writes:

I wish I could completely skip Marx… does that make me a bad person? I suppose I shouldn’t. A few in the department would probably be miffed too if they found out.

First, Daniel, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Indeed, my respect for you just rose from what was already a reasonably high level.

Second, that reminds me of a true story. My friend Chris Jehn, while a Ph.D. student in the University of Chicago’s economics program in the late 1960s or early 1970s, took a course in the history of economic thought from the late George Stigler. Many people might have forgotten this, or perhaps never knew it because George was known mainly for his work in industrial organization and regulation, but the history of thought was one of George’s passions and it was an area in which published a lot in the 1940s and 1950s.

Back to the story. The first day of class, Stigler handed out a pretty comprehensive syllabus and started going over it in class. A student with a foreign voice raised his hand. ‘Yes,’ said Stigler (and if I could do the voice in this blog, you would hear a reasonable imitation of Stigler’s distinctive voice.)

‘Professor Stigler, I see that there is nothing on the syllabus by Karl Marx. Why is that?’

Stigler paused and then answered: ‘Marx was a lousy economist.’

So this was my comment on whether or not Marx should be taught as part of an HET course:

My Defending the History of Economic Thought is about to be published next month by Edward Elgar. In it I devote a chapter to discussing how I think the history of economic thought should be taught with one of the main points I make being that Marxist economics should not be. HET in my view is either about how the economics we find in our texts evolved through time into what we see. Or is it about how the mainstream of the profession answered particular economic questions during different periods of time in the past. In neither case would I think that the inclusion of Marxist economic theory would be relevant.

It’s not whether Marxist theory is good or bad economics but whether it fits into the point of an HET course which is to understand the evolution of mainstream economic theory.