Francis Wayland (1796–1865) became the president of Brown University at age 31, remaining so for twenty-eight years. According to the custom of that era, the president taught moral philosophy and political economy to the Brown undergraduates. Wayland published his lectures on moral philosophy as a textbook in 1835 (this essay cites the 1837 edition); his notes on political economy followed in 1837 (this essay cites the 1841 edition). The Elements of Moral Science ultimately reached 100,000 copies in print, while The Elements of Political Economy reached approximately 50,000 copies and its abridgment another 12,000 (Wayland and Wayland 1868, p. 389). Paul T. Heyne (1982, p. 126) states that Wayland's Political Economy “was by far the most popular political economy texbook prior to the Civil War,” with ongoing influence “through adaptations and imitations.” A comparison of book sales to college enrollments suggests that Wayland's Political Economy served a greater proportion of the market of its day than Paul Samuelson's Economics did between 1948–1980.

In this contribution, we provide an interpretation of Friedrich von Wieser’s contribution to economics that pays tribute to the originality of his work and particularly to his view of how institutions interfere with individual behavior. This interaction takes place within a disequilibrium framework where social influences such as power or social class, and psychological factors such as force of habit or herd behavior, are the product of human action but also constitute constraints on further action. Section II stresses the institutionalist background of Wieser’s economics. We concentrate on Wieser’s general method—which we assimilate to an example of Joseph Agassi’s (1975) institutional individualism—and his analysis of the emergence and evolution of institutions via the dynamics of leaders and masses. In section III, we reinforce and illustrate the institutionalist stamp of Wieser’s economics by focusing on his work on monetary economics (Wieser 1904, 1909a, 1909b, 1927b) and his analysis of the emergence of money, based on our reading of Wieser’s Social Economics ([1927a] 1967) and The Law of Power ([1926] 1983).

It is now almost eighty years since Michal Kalecki published his formal mathematical model of the business cycle. In this paper, we want to examine the vision embedded in that early model and the writings he published at around the same time. Sections II and III center on Kalecki’s approach to local and global (in)-stability, and section IV suggests a simplified model designed to pinpoint key aspects of Kalecki’s thinking related to the issue of endogenous cycles, ‘class struggle,’ and growth.

The paper discusses the influence of Pareto’s methodological revolution on the Italian scientific tradition in public finance. To that end, the works of the most celebrated scholars from within the first, second, and final generations of this tradition are reviewed with reference to their reactions to Pareto’s idea of science as logico-experimental activities, and his contributions to the development of marginalism and theoretical sociology. The particular scholars considered across the three generations’ time span include Pantaleoni, De Viti, Barone, Einaudi, Sensini, Griziotti, Borgatta, Murray, and Fasiani. The main original contribution of this paper is the marshaling of evidence in support of the author’s proposition that Fasiani’s research program is characterized by a clearly Paretian mode of enquiry with regard to methodology and the economic investigation of fiscal activities, although the specific influence of Pareto’s sociology on Fasiani’s approach to fiscal studies was relatively modest. It is provisionally concluded that, in taking the best and most relevant of Pareto’s work for fiscal studies, Fasiani’s contributions came to represent the highest point in the evolution of the general theory of public finance in the Italian tradition.

This article is an addition to the revisited history of financial economics. While Markowitz (1952, 1959), Roy (1952), and Tobin (1958) are recognized as the founding fathers of Modern Portfolio Theory, we recall that its origins should be traced prior to 1914. We consider two, turn-of-the-century, French, financial analysts and suggest that notions such as risk aversion and risk premium, international diversification and correlation, specific and systematic risks and arbitrage were common sense for Leroy-Beaulieu (1906) and Neymarck (1913). The contribution of these authors to the development of Modern Portfolio Theory—long before the 1950s—should not be underestimated.

In December 1913, William Ernest Johnson (1858–1931), a Cambridge logician, published a famous article on demand theory in the Economic Journal (EJ) entitled “The Pure Theory of Utility Curves.” Although Johnson's treatment of the subject was in some ways original, in others it strongly resembled the analysis set forth by Vilfredo Pareto in earlier contributions, particularly in the Manuel d'économie politique (Italian edition 1906, French edition 1909). Despite this resemblance, Johnson did not cite Pareto. This failure to acknowledge Pareto's precedence aroused resentment and some suspicion of plagiarism among the Italian Paretians. In the end, however, the Paretian economists of the period generally assumed that Johnson was unfamiliar with Pareto's works and had obtained his results independently. For example, in 1916, Luigi Amoroso published a review of Johnson's 1913 paper in the Giornale degli Economisti, in which he wrote, “From Johnson's article it comes out that Johnson does not know Pareto's work” (Amoroso 1916, p. 410, author's translation). Amoroso attributed Johnson's ignorance of Pareto's work to a more general ignorance on the part of English economists, “Johnson's lacuna, more than particular to him, is a lacuna of the area in which he lives” (Amoroso 1916, p. 410, author's translation).

Adam Smith’s discourses aim to encourage mores, practices, and public policies in service to the common good, or that which a universally benevolent spectator would approve of. The Wealth of Nations illustrates how in pursuing our own happiness within the bounds of prudence and commutative justice, we may be said, literally or metaphorically, to cooperate with God in furthering the happiness of humankind. The Theory of Moral Sentiments elaborates an ethic, here called “focalism,” that instructs us to proportion our beneficent efforts to our knowledge and ability. The relationship between political economy and focalism is bidirectionally reinforcing. In one direction, the ethic of focalism contributes to the moral authorization of self-love, thereby invigorating and dignifying honest commercial activities. In the other direction, the insights of political economy reinforce the ethic of focalism by elaborating how through prudent commerce and focal beneficence, we cooperate, even if only metaphorically, in a grand social enterprise.

Economists regularly appear as expert witnesses in antitrust litigations. This paper analyzes how their models and methodologies have performed vis-à-vis the standards of relevance and reliability affirmed by the US Supreme Court in Daubert and its progeny. Some explanations for the economists’ troubles when facing a Daubert challenge in antitrust cases are provided.

In 1885 John Kells Ingram published a lengthy article on the history of political economy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in 1888 he republished this same article, with only minor changes, as a book entitled The History of Political Economy. Ingram unashamedly interpreted the historical development of political economy from a Comtean variant of the historicist perspective, and, for this reason, these publications became extremely important for the methodological debate, known as the English Methodenstreit, then raging between the orthodox and historical economists. Although the historicist message dovetailed into Ingram's historical narrative was clearly contentious and polemical, the reviews of both versions of this history from either side of the conceptual divide were overwhelmingly positive. Two exceptions were damning anonymous newspaper reviews in The Scotsman: one in 1885 in response to the Encyclopaedia Britannica article, and another in 1888 in response to the book. It is apparent from an entry made in the diary of John Neville Keynes that the first of these reviews was written by Joseph Shield Nicholson (JNK, July 28, 1885, Add 7834), and since the articles are strikingly similar in tone, substance, and style, and since Nicholson wrote other reviews for The Scotsman, it is safe to assume that the second article was also written by Nicholson. The substance of Nicholson's critique can be reduced to two main accusations: first, that Ingram was neither qualified to write a history of political economy nor competent to comment on the methodological issues then under scrutiny, and second, that Ingram had brazenly plagiarized passages drawn from various German histories of political economy.

The emergence of railroads in France in the nineteenth century raised new debates on analytical issues. The issue lies in the fact that they are natural monopolies. In this paper, I focus on Jules Dupuit’s work on the operations of the railroads. Curiously, he seemed to have defended two contrasting positions: on the one hand, he claimed that unlimited competition is the most efficient way to operate in the railroads; on the other, he stated that State management was the best way to run them. I aim to restore the consistency of Dupuit’s positions. I show that, for him, unlimited competition is not possible in the railroads and that it is not necessarily good for the welfare of society. Therefore, the State should regulate this sector. Then, I specify the conditions under which Dupuit believed the State should manage the railroads instead of offering concessions to private companies.

This paper sheds light on Albion Small’s views on the inequalities resulting from capital concentration. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, Small sought ways to reduce social injustice, which in his view was key to avoiding class conflict and preserving democracy. He emphasized the need to devise social policies with a view to ensuring the equality of opportunities for all to realize what Small termed their “interests”—through the combination of their labor with “tool-capital.” Small entrusted the State with the central role of fighting capital inequalities through social policies, the treatment of inequalities dealing with morals. He embraced the then-fashionable idea of reasonable capitalism, as expounded by fellow progressive scholars, the likes of Richard T. Ely, John Dewey, or John R. Commons, who all sensed that such an economic system would survive only if it improves the social well-being as well as the self-development of all individuals.

Thorstein Veblen's theory of institutions has often been interpreted as explaining that institutions (social habits) are formed in previous time periods under the influence of earlier states of technology. Accordingly, in the modern era institutions are “static, backward looking, and resistant to change, alterations…occurring only under pressure from the dynamic of technological progress” (Rutherford 1984, p. 331). As a recent case in point, R. W. Ault and R. B. Ekelund (1988, p. 438; see also p. 435) stated that Veblen's “view of habits was an inert and exogenous view.” Malcolm Rutherford (1984) has noted that Veblen described several processes of internal development of institutions within a system governed by a given logic, e.g., the business enterprise system under the logic of pecuniary values.

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines—e.g., mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics—during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false.

This paper consists of a rhetorical interpretation of two essays published fifty years ago, at the beginning of the so-called “Latin American economic school.” Both were written by the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986), who was then working at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). As the most prominent Latin American economist, Prebisch fostered the construction of a theoretical framework that heavily influenced Latin American development policies after World War II.

Economics in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s was notable for the richness of its methodological and theoretical approaches. Encompassing the peak period of American institutionalism, these years also witnessed a recurrent debate over the proper scope and method of economics which was bracketed by a minor methodenstreit in the 1920s and the measurement-withouttheory dispute of the late 1940s. In retrospect it is apparent which lines of thought would dominate economic discourse in later decades. At the time, however, this future was not as clear. A late 1920s evaluation by Paul Homan of the state of contemporary economics concluded that economists “seem in our own day to be separated by more impassable barriers of thought than at any time in the past” (Homan 1928, p. 10). In looking beyond “the present impasse,” as he called it, Homan concluded that “whether economics in the future shall consist of a body of doctrines, or a body of facts scientifically ascertained, or a technique, or more or less of one and the other, is on the laps of the gods” (ibid., pp. 466-67).

Why did classical utilitarian thinkers offer only a thin defense of the institution of private property? Utilitarians might have viewed such a defense as irrelevant, trivial, or impossible. A fourth hypothesis holds that utilitarians were ambivalent about the institution, itself. The utilitarians are clear on the relevance of a defense. Triviality would have to be based on 18th century philosophers and historians. Impossibility would raise serious questions about the utilitarian project. Ambivalence seems the most plausible explanation. Utilitarian writings throw considerable doubt on their own commitment to the strongest versions of the defense of private property.