This article presents some observations on “public happiness” in order to clarify the idea’s meaning in the eighteenth-century Italian context. It examines Lugino Bruni’s interpretation of this concept, and criticizes his understanding of public happiness as the continuation of Artistotle’s eudaimonia. Bruni stresses the social and collective nature of happiness in the civil economy of the Italian eighteenth century. By examining the works of Ludovico Antonio Muratori and Antonio Genovesi, this article addresses instead the political meaning of public happiness for absolute monarchies, and underlines its origins in the German tradition of natural law.

The equation of exchange is identified with the name Irving Fisher. Although it is not the quantity theory, a point often made by him, it is the core organizing ingredient for his subsequent quantity theoretic analyses. It has in fact been argued that the quantity theory was central to Fisher's work, that “his fundamental premise and basis for all other analysis and policy prescription was this: money matters and matters most, [that he indeed was] the first of the modern ‘monetarists’” (Allen 1977, p. 563).

Historians of economics have acknowledged the significant role François Quesnay and the Physiocrats played in the early development of mathematical economics. It is, however, important to note that although the Tableau économique could well be translated into algebra, Quesnay never did it. As part of our research on Charles Richard de Butré, an obscure collaborator of François Quesnay, we have uncovered documents that show that he was one Physiocrat who did use algebra to explain his theoretical conceptions. In two texts written at the end of 1766 and the beginning of 1767, Butré systematically used algebra as an aid for economic reasoning. Our argument is that these texts provide very interesting insights into the development of early mathematical economics.

The transformation of economics through its mathematization has been of interest to historians of economics and economic thought. While considering aspects of this history, Philip Mirowski (1986a, 1992) and Lionel Punzo (1989, 1991) have introduced David Hilbert's work, the Hilbert program, formalism, and Kurt GddePs results into their discussions in a way that is inconsistent with the mathematical community's understanding of mathematical history.

“…a remarkably clever book, the result of close thought, much observation, and some research. Yet, after having read the book with attention, we are disposed to ask, why has it been written?” (The Athenaeum, May 1865).

Nearly a half-century has passed since Ronald Meek (1956, p. 63) warned us that Adam Smith's notion of the labor commanded by a commodity in the marketplace is to be understood not as an expression of the “substance” of value, varying “directly with the quantity of social labor used to produce” the object, but rather as nothing more than a unit of value measure with no fixed relationship to the labor “embodied” in production. It was this distinction that he sought to fix in our minds with his memorable image of the magnet. Indeed, it is more than three times as long since John Stuart Mill (1848, p. 568) conveyed the same distinction with his particularly apt metaphor of “the thermometer and the fire.” Further, it is now forty years since Mark Blaug (1959), reminding us of that distinction, returned our attention to Smith's use of his measure as an expression of potential productive capacity (a view advanced earlier yet by Hla Myint 1948, pp. 20–21 and by Meek 1956, p. 65), but one that conveys a subjective dimension as well. Yet in spite of a now widespread concurrence in this reading, the “legend” that Smith's concept of labor commanded is to be understood as expressing, in some way, price ratios proportional to ratios of labor embodied in production remains remarkably resilient.

This paper reconstructs an important and little-known part of the activity of Richard Kahn in the 1950s, both as researcher and as policy advisor, which centered on the drafting of a book for the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Never actually published by the FAO for reasons clarified in this paper, the book dealt with fluctuations in the prices of primary products and how best to curb them. Offering a novel development of an idea first proposed by John Maynard Keynes, Kahn advocates the creation of buffer stocks managed by a supranational authority endowed with ample discretionary powers. The paper presents a complete reconstruction of Kahn’s views on the advantages of buffer stocks as an instrument to stabilize commodity prices, of the context in which these views took shape, and of the way they tied in with other parts of his economic theory and were reflected in his assessment of the commodity international agreements of the time to limit fluctuations in the prices of primary products. It thus fills a significant gap in our knowledge of one of the great economists of the twentieth century.

This paper examines the role of the English economist Arthur (A. J.) Brown in the 1950s debate surrounding the wage-rate change/unemployment relationship. While the publication of William (Bill) Phillips’s 1958 paper and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” attracted a wealth of attention, Brown’s book on the subject, The Great Inflation, and his later work on inflation have received much less. Here, the focus is on redressing this situation somewhat by looking at Brown’s work to see how much it predates Phillips’s paper, and what differences there are to it. We also consider this within the changing institutional structure of English economic networks in the 1950s that led to a relatively rapid acceptance of Phillips’s analysis and, in many cases, to a strong, ordinal interpretation of the Phillips Curve that overshadowed Brown’s work.

More than a century ago, one of the most famous essays ever written in American economics appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics: “Why is Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?” There, Thorstein Veblen claimed that economics was too dominated by a mechanistic view to address the problems of economic life. Since the world and the economy had come to be viewed from an evolutionary perspective after Charles Darwin, it was rather straightforward to argue that the increasingly abstract mathematical character of economics was non-evolutionary. However, Veblen had studied with a first-rate intellect, Charles Sanders Peirce, attending his elementary logic class. If Peirce had written about the future of economics in 1898, it would have been very different than Veblen’s essay. Peirce could have written that economics should become an evolutionary mathematical science and that much of classical and neoclassical economics could be interpreted from an evolutionary perspective.

I was motivated to consider the topics of this paper by repeatedly encountering the same problems in pondering the history of economic thought, not only in my own work but when retereeing papers and reading the publications of others. The problems that I will consider are important because they involve fundamental issues in the selections and representations we make of the history of economic thought. I do not have solutions for all of the problems, nor do I believe that each of them has a single solution. My objective in this address is not precisely to solve the problems, although I will suggest some ways of dealing with some of them. My purpose rather is to identify the problems in a clear way and to review how they have been treated in order to provide a common basis for further discussion. They can be divided into technical problems and problems of approach.

In the spring of 1860, Henry C. Carey, the Philadelphia political economist and apostle of protectionism, offered a revision of his doctrine in hope of saving the Union. For several years, in such writings as The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign (1853) and The North and the South (1854), he had argued that reimposition of high protective tariffs promised material prosperity for the free population and gradual emancipation of the slaves. With secession looming he enlarged the argument. In a series of letters to the Memphis Daily Enquirer, he explained how the original error of liberal trade beginning in 1833 had interacted with climate and migration to produce economic crises and sectional conflict. Political economy not only pointed to the right course, it showed why the course was blocked from view. Prosperity, gradual emancipation, and preservation of the union all depended on the inhabitants of the central "Mineral Zone," from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, first seeing the blockage and then uniting to correct the combined policy errors of the northern "Trading Zone" and the southern "Planting Zone." Carey's neglected "zone theory" shows the direction and ambitions of an important strain of American political economy in the immediate antebellum period. It also merits attention as an early example of economic theories of geography and institutions akin to those claiming attention today.

Of the published works by William Stanley Jevons, the marginalist theory of value and distribution in the Theory of Political Economy (1871) is principally remembered by economists today. For Jevons in the early 1870s, however, the reception of the Theory (TPE) had “been of the most discouraging character.” The “recognised professor[s] of the science,” for example, had either ignored or, in the case of J. E. Cairnes, “emphatically repudiated it” (Jevons 1875a, p. 4). In November 1874, buoyed by the publication of the first volume of Leon Walras's Elements of Pure Economics and by correspondence with Walras and other European economists, Jevons presented a defense of the marginalist theory and reply to critics in an address titled “The Progress of the Mathematical Theory of Political Economy.” It was delivered to the Manchester Statistical Society, and was extensively reported in the local newspapers. Jevons used those reports to both publicize and obtain comments on the address before the final version was published in 1875. As some of the papers circulated beyond Manchester, London, readers, for example, could also read or hear of his analysis. In that regard, one component of his argument attracted particular attention.

Oral history has always held a rather ambiguous position within the study of economics. While widely read and enjoyed, such interviews are secretly scorned, dismissed as merely a lightweight diversion. Yet, to conduct revealing and insightful work of this type is difficult, requiring a firm grasp of economics, especially individual contributions to the discipline. This article examines my own attempts to come to grips with the methodology and ideology of the Chicago School through a series of conversations with some nineteen of George Stigler’s contemporaries. Oral history, if skillfully conducted, can prove to be one of the more useful tools in recapturing and understanding the past history of economics as a fiercely fought over discipline.

This article highlights the roles played by knowledge brokers in the history of economics. Knowledge creation is the joint product of teams of people engaged in parallel work. Economists do their professional work, whether that involves creating elaborate theories, gathering and interpreting data, or conducting experiments, all the while creating a variety of competing narratives about the economy. Economic agents go about their daily lives creating goods and services, caring for one another, saving and consuming, all the while making decisions based on whatever narratives they believe about how the economy functions. The various narratives between and among economists and economic agents create market opportunities for knowledge brokers, who sell their services to whoever will pay. They popularize economic insights in bestselling books, and work for think tanks or with various organizations, but they are also textbook writers, journal editors, and conference organizers, all of whom jointly contribute to the edifice of economic knowledge and facilitate communication. European beekeeping is used as an analogy.

The early Methodenstreit (1871–1883) between Gustav Schmoller and Carl Menger is one of the defining moments in the development of today’s discipline of economics. However, recent interpretations of the debate no longer identify a substantial point of controversy. I reconstruct the debate to show that the pivotal topic was the scope of economics. Menger claims that his marginalist Principles of Economics more or less captures the entire subject matter of the discipline, which Schmoller denies. I also discuss recent scholarship, which follows Friedrich Hayek to situate Menger at the edges or even outside the marginalist mainstream. I show that support for this reading is weak and in parts based on a misrepresentation of the available sources, putting into question Menger’s status as a forbear of today’s Austrian school.

Division of labor is thought to imply increasing returns to scale, which in turn implies that wages rise continually with economic growth. Yet the price theory of Wealth of Nations rests upon the assumption that the “natural” price of labor (and capital) is determined at any steady-state rate of balanced growth. There would seem, therefore, to be an irreconcilable contradiction between Smith’s exposition of the division of labor in Book I, chapters 1 to 3, and his price theory as set out in Book I, chapters 6 to 9.

The development of Austrian economics in the interwar period was marked by the contrast between its high esteem at the beginning of the 1930s and its dwindling influence throughout the remainder of the decade. A variety of reasons have been conjectured for this decline (and the eventual dissolution) of the Austrian school of economics (see Caldwell 1988, pp. 517–21). A rarely mentioned factor of a more sociological nature that may have contributed to or that at least indicated the school's decline was its loss of coherence during the late 1930s, when, as a consequence of the emigration of the most prominent members, Vienna lost its role as the Austrian school's main center of communication. Insofar as this lack of coherence led not just to diversity within a unifying framework but to crucial divergences among the school's leading members, this might help to explain why after 1945 the Austrians were no longer perceived as a distinct school—some parts of their thinking had been fused into the neoclassical mainstream and others had largely fallen into disregard.

The American political economist Henry Charles Carey is generally thought of as a spokesman for industrialization due to his strident protectionism. In fact, his most original contributions came in his discussions of agriculture, the environment, and their relation to technological progress. Carey developed his ideas by drawing on the contemporary discourse of “scientific agriculture,” which enjoyed great influence, thanks to a widespread agricultural reform movement. This allowed him to argue effectively against Malthusian population doctrine and Ricardian rent theory by stressing the almost limitless potential of technological innovation, not only in manufactures but also in agriculture. Analogous views were also expressed by George Perkins Marsh, known today as the “father of conservationism,” indicating a broader contemporary engagement with questions of economic development and humanity’s relationship to nature, an engagement in some ways strikingly parallel to present-day concerns.