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.

The purpose of this paper is to recover Adam Smith's conception of the appropriate rules of argumentation for the political economist in public policy discussion. Our interest will be in Smith's attempt to model the advisory style which he thought appropriate for an economist writing on public policy issues, advising the legislature and debating constitutional problems. Inferences will be drawn from the scope and tone of Smith's work on some selected issues of economic policy reform discussed in The Wealth of Nations (hereafter WN). Extensive reference will be made to Smith's admission of the vital role of rhetoric in human affairs in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and to Smith's view of the legislator's perspective on policy as enunciated in the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The paper analyzes the rise of the Latin American-based inertial inflation theory. Starting in the 1950s, various traditions in economics purported to explain the concept of “inflation inertia.” Contributions ranging from Celso Furtado and Mário Henrique Simonsen to James Tobin anticipated key aspects of what later became the inertial inflation hypothesis, building it into either mathematical or conceptual frameworks compatible with the then contemporaneous macroeconomic theory. In doing so, they bridged the analytical gap with the North American developments while maintaining the key features of the CEPAL (United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) approach, such as distributional conflicts and local institutional details. These contributions eventually influenced the second moment of the monetarist–structuralist controversy that unraveled in the 1980s. The paper also highlights how later works by structuralist economists gradually stripped the inertial inflation approach of its previous substance and form, thereby unearthing tensions among Latin American structuralists that led to the eventual decline of this research program.

This paper explores C. F. W. Launhardt's (1885) model of exchange and his associated welfare analysis. Launhardt's analysis, starting from the exchange models of W. S. Jevons and Leon Walras, is noteworthy for his derivation from explicit utility functions of algebraic forms of general equilibrium supply and demand curves expressed as functions of relative prices. Whereas Jevons and Walras concentrated on the pricetaking equilibrium properties of their exchange models, Launhardt explored a process of disequilibrium trading in which successive trades take place at the “short end” of the market, that is, the minimum of supply and demand at a price. His main concern was, however, to examine the welfare aspects of exchange, comparing the gains from trade under competitive and monopolistic behavior. Launhardt has been criticized for suggesting that aggregate utility, and thus the aggregate gain from trade, is maximized at the price-taking equilibrium (see for example, Wicksell 1954, p. 76, n. 2; 1934, p. 81, n. 1). He nevertheless showed that a process of disequilibrium trading, in which the price initially favors the relatively poorer individual, can improve the aggregate gains from trade as compared with the equilibrium with no disequilibrium transactions, subsequently called a price-taking equilibrium.

Unlike standard accounts, recent research in the history of macroeconomics has given increasing attention to the Old Keynesians’ criticisms of the New Classical Economics. In this paper, I address the case of Edmond Malinvaud, who began opposing the New Classical Economics from the early 1980s and did so throughout the following thirty years. This study shows that his opposition was radical, i.e., multi-dimensional and systematic, and owes to the methodology and the practice of macroeconometric modeling. In turn, this twofold result sheds light on the nature and the rationale of the Old Keynesians’ opposition to the New Classical Economics from the 1970s onwards, which can be interpreted along the same lines.

Ragnar Frisch’s famous “rocking horse” model has been the object of much praise and even controversy since its publication in 1933. This paper offers a new simulation of the model to show that there exist cyclical trajectories in the propagation mechanism. By building an analytical solution taking the same form as Frisch’s original solution, we can provide new insights into the ideas encapsulated in his model, in particular the fact that the author constructed a model combining cycles and growth. The exploration of Frisch’s formal construction of the model leads us to link his statistical work on the decomposition of time series with his economic insights on investment cycles, which both led to the 1933 model. We contrast Frisch’s approach to that of other econometricians who used similar equations, showing that their different mathematical solutions were the product of what they wanted to show with their models.

Ever since the French Revolution, Abbé de Mably has been portrayed as a forerunner of utopian communism and common ownership, and, more recently still, as a “classical republican” in the Age of Enlightenment. This article aims to reappraise Mably’s position. We attempt to show that he proposed a science of commerce in his Droit public de l’Europe (1746), and that his economic ideas displayed continuity and consistency throughout his lifetime. Far from being an enemy of trade, Mably sought a realpolitik in an attempt to strike a balance between the race for the enrichment of nations of the Moderns and the virtues and equality of the Ancients that he never thought possible to restore. The paper also examines his place in the history of economics. In particular, the similarities and differences between Mably’s ideas and those of the Gournay circle are studied, the issue of inequalities being the dividing line between them.

Vishnugupta Chanakya Kautilya wrote a treatise called The Arthashastra, which means “science of wealth.” It contains three parts, which deal with issues related to economic development, administration of justice, and foreign relations. It has 150 chapters, which are distributed into fifteen books. Book three, which has twenty chapters and book four, which has thirteen chapters, are devoted to the administration of justice. Kautilya's Judicial System called “Dandaniti,” “the science of law enforcement” is an important part of The Arthashastra. Kautilya codified, modified, and created new laws related to: loans, deposits, pledges, mortgages etc., sale and purchase of property, inheritance and partition of ancestral property, labor contracts, partnership, defamation and assault, theft and violent robbery, and sexual offenses. He dealt with law and justice issues relating to both the civil law and the criminal law. He offered a truly comprehensive system of justice, which not only incorporated all the salient elements of a twenty-first century system but also contained a few additional invaluable insights.

I showed a draft of my presidential address to a friend the other day. He read for a few minutes, then looked up at me and said, “Your address will be remembered long after The Wealth of Nations, Ricardo's Principles, and The General Theory are all forgotten, but not until then!”

Remembering is what we who read, write, and teach history of economics are about. Historians preserve memory; we collect historical facts, organize them, and store them in conceptual filing systems. Remembering accurately and fully is hard work. Memory is tricky. It is always incomplete. It is well known that different witnesses to an event such as a traffic accident can remember the event quite differently, so that their accounts of what happened seem incompatible with each other. They may even appear not to be reports of the same event.

In economics as in anthropology, old artifacts spur continuing debates. A case in point is Knut Wicksell's 1898 analysis of the cumulative process of price inflation in pure credit, cashless economies. Some economists view Wicksell's model as a milestone in the evolution of quantity-theoretic monetary analysis inasmuch as it constitutes the seminal rigorous explanation of how loan-created stocks of bank money translate interest rate differentials into price level changes. Others, however, dispute this point and instead argue that money plays no role in determining price level changes in Wicksell's model.

Classical political economy in Great Britain was broadly supportive of education, but limited government’s role to modest assistance for charitable schools. The early classical economists in the United States, men like Thomas Cooper and Francis Wayland, in addition to supporting free trade, took this classical position with respect to education. But a more aggressive democratic claim was being advanced by the American common school movement and its supporters among Whig protectionists. The early economic tracts of William Jennison, Willard Phillips, Calvin Colton, and Henry Carey envisioned a larger role for government and advocated support for publicly financed common schools. Most notably, the leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann, built a defense for public financing based on a radical theory of property, derived from distinctly Puritan economic doctrine. If his radical positions received little support from post-Civil War mainstream economists, Mann’s practical advocacy of public taxation for public schools very much carried the day.

The popular view among many contemporary economists is that our predecessors were literate but not numerate. Their myopia is curious to those who have the benefit of greater historical perspective. Many early practitioners of political economy can be credited with recognizing that, by their very nature, the problems in which they were interested required them to measure, quantify and enumerate. From the seventeenth century onwards, inquiring minds had already learned to distrust information and ideas that derived from the then traditional qualitative approach to science, which described the sensations associated with objects and events. William Petty's Political Arithmetic is a case in point; it aimed not simply to record and describe reality in terms of

In 1922, Thomas Edison publicly introduced his latest invention—a new type of money, a commodity-backed currency that he believed was the long-term solution to America's monetary woes. “I want to cast the variable out of money. This gold money is not good enough. It's a fiction” he boldly proclaimed (New York Times 1922).

This paper aims to detail Frisch’s choice of setting the accelerator principle at the core of his impulse-propagation model (1933a), referred to as the “rocking horse model.” The innovative aspects of this model rest not only on the rise of macrodynamics regarding the equilibrium concept but also on the reformulation of business cycles in terms of production of capital goods. This is a deliberate choice, which relies on his work on business cycles started in 1927, and can be obviously traced back to his debate with John Maurice Clark and the American Institutionalists, but relies more deeply on a specific appropriation of Norwegian approach to this principle.