There he proceeded to denounce some aspects of failure for economic historians (a methodological critique that probably not a single “new economic history” scholar can avoid having to deal with), and that Stefano wanted to exhibit as a Lutheran reformation for cliometricians, writing: “... and to a church door I nail these theses: that we cliometricians have failed as economists, that we have failed as historians, that we have failed as economic historians”.
Clearly, this is too harsh a statement, certainly with reference to his own contributions. And there is much more, in this “Spleen” paper on the failures of the cliometrics school, about the methodological needs of the discipline, of economic history as well as economics at large, that those few lines suggest.