Economics today has been widely criticised as being more concerned with mathematical technique than the understanding and explanation of real world phenomena. However, one hundred years ago, in Europe and America, economics was fused with the study of history and its practitioners emphasised the importance of the understanding of specific institutions. How Economics Forgot History shows how the German historical school addressed a key problem in social science and concerned themselves with the historical specific character of economic phenomena and the need to make economic theory more sensitive to the historical and geographical variety of different socio-economic systems. Examining the nature and evolution of the problem of historical specificity, it shows how this problem was tackled by the likes of Karl Marx, Gustav Schmoller, Carl Menger, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, Alfred Marshall, John Rogers Commons and Frank Knight. It is also argued that alongside Lionel Robbins, leading figures such as John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Talcott Parsons also helped to divert the social sciences away from this problem. Geoffrey M. Hodgson concludes with some suggestions as to how modern economics can begin to once again take this problem on board, and become more sensitive to the great structural and institutional changes in history, as well as those we have witnessed in recent decades. He argues that disciplinary boundaries have to be re-evaluated, in an effort to once again provide the social sciences with an adequate historical vision.