James Mill’s account of the decision process is part of his theory of the human mind, which in turn is the cornerstone of his theory of education. Mill believed the end of education was to produce happiness, and that this happiness required action by the individual. A problem, as Mill saw it, was that intemperance might interfere with the decision process, causing individuals to take actions that do not promote their greatest happiness. This paper provides an interpretation of this process from a formal perspective, in the light of Mill’s view on intemperance.

Are Pierre Leroux, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Leon Walras economists? Certainly, but to a different extent. This alphabetical order, which is also that of chronology, seems to be in inverse order of merit—at least in the opinion of Joseph A. Schumpeter, who praised Walras as “the greatest of all economists…as far as pure theory is concerned” (1954, p. 827), but who briefly described Proudhon as someone who defended “results that are no doubt absurd” (ibid., p. 457). Leroux's name does not even appear in Schumpeter's 1954 book, nor in any other history of economic thought. Although the judgment pronounced by a historian on one or another of our three authors may be contested, there seems no reason to call into question the hierarchy implicitly established by Schumpeter. In a certain way the succession: Leroux, Proudhon, Walras, represents and summarizes the development of political economy, beginning with the embryonic stage (which would be represented by Leroux), passing through the disorders of adolescence (Proudhon), and finally arriving at the stage of scientific maturity (Walras).

Paolo Sylos Labini’s Oligopoly Theory and Technical Progress (1957) is considered one of the major contributions to entry-prevention models, especially after Franco Modigliani’s formalization. Nonetheless, Modigliani neglected Sylos Labini’s aim when reviewing his work (1958), particularly his demonstration of the dynamic relation between industrial concentration and economic development. Modigliani addressed only Sylos Labini’s microeconomic analysis and the determination of the long-run equilibrium price and output, concentrating on the role played by firms’ anticipations. By doing so he shifted attention from Sylos Labini’s objective analysis to a subjective approach to the oligopoly problem. This paper discusses Sylos Labini’s and Modigliani’s differing approaches, derives the origin of the Sylos postulate, and sets Modigliani’s interpretation of Sylos Labini’s oligopoly theory in the context of his 1950s research into firms’ behavior under uncertainty.

In his Presidential address to the American Economic Association, Gary Becker alludes to Thomas Malthus's “great contribution” (1988, p. 1) in a prologue to a wider exploratory discussion of some of the implications for macroeconomics flowing from recent programs in family economics. The content of the contribution as represented here (p. 2) includes diminishing returns to increases in employment “when land and other capital are fixed;” population growth positively related to the wage, the lower population growth at low wages turning on reduced birth rates (the preventive check) and increased death rates (the positive check); and a long-run equilibrium wage at which population is constant at a level determined by the production function. Becker emphasizes the stability of the equilibrium wage in the face of disturbances. A catastrophic reduction in population size (eg. the Black Death) and consequently a wage increase will be followed by positive population growth which restores both the wage and population size to their respective equilibrium levels. In the event of increases in the amount of usuable land, population size will become permanently higher with the wage ultimately reduced to its original long-run level. Becker represents Malthus as reaching “much more pessimistic conclusions about the long-term economic prospects of the average family” than, for example, Godwin and Condorcet who had maintained that the economic position of mankind will continue to improve over time.

In the last decade or so, intellectual historians have tried to alter and enhance our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment by situating the classic writings in the context of contemporary political debates and intellectual traditions. Two main approaches have emerged to date, tied to the themes of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism respectively. While both have much to offer to historians of economic thought, the present paper seeks to evaluate only the latter. It focuses in particular on civic humanist interpretations of the economic theories of David Hume and Adam Smith.

This essay serves as the introduction to the authors’ translation of Karl Knies’ essay “Die nationaloekonomische Lehre vom Werth” (1855). Knies is one of the acknowledged founders of the Older German Historical School, and yet in recent years several writers have described his 1855 essay as seminal in the evolution of marginal utility analysis. The authors examine how Knies develops his nascent theory of marginal reasoning in his essay, arguing that rather than cling to his earlier historicist programmatic, Knies attempts to discover general laws; however, not by strict causal analysis but by a typical ‘German art’ of taxonomy and classification that resembles juridical argumentations. This results in an ambiguous text, which influenced several marginalist pioneers who studied under Knies at Heidelberg (including Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and John Bates Clark), as well as several members of the Younger German Historical School (including Gustav von Schmoller).

Historians of economic thought have long debated about the methodological position adopted by Alfred Marshall (1842–1924) concerning the mathematization of economics. While Francis Y. Edgeworth and Marshall's pupils, most notably A. C. Pigou and J. M. Keynes, agreed that it was mainly through him that mathematical economics has since become respectable (see Pigou 1925, p. 66) and proclaimed him the founder of modern diagrammatic economics (ibid., p. 24), more recent commentators have criticized his failure to give proper credit to mathematics, and have even depicted him as an enemy of such an approach (see, for example, Schumpeter 1951, p. 97; Coase 1975; Brems 1975; Creedy 1986, p. 126; Schabas 1989; Huriot 1994, p. 17).

Professor Kenneth Arrow has now added his views to the current Ricardian controversy in a provocative survey of alternative judgments regarding David Ricardo's contribution (Arrow 1991). Arrow's primary thesis appears to be that “the main thrust of Ricardo's system is a bold attempt to determine values independent of demand considerations” (Arrow 1991, p. 75), a position which has already come under attack (Caravale 1991; Hollander 1991). Our aim, however, is not to examine Ricardo's treatment of demand directly, but to question the fundamental suppositions upon which Arrow's analysis rests and the resulting conclusion that emerges.

When Walras's Market Models was published, a friend wrote to me that he hoped that it would stimulate research on Walras's work. I am very pleased that his wish is coming true. A number of writers have reexamined it from new perspectives. It is, perhaps, inevitable that the quality and tone of the texts is uneven, and it is to be hoped that in the future all Walrasian research can be done carefully, in good taste, in a dispassionate fashion, and without rhetorical devices and patronizing remarks. In any event, I have presented in my book the results of 30 years of study of Walras's work, and I invite the reader to contrast what I have written with differing expositions. I have nothing to add to those results at this time, except the data which follow.

Liang Chi-chao (1873–1929) was a major figure in Chinese intellectual history around the turn of the century. Although he never learned to read any western language, Liang took on the role of an intellectual intermediary, reading voraciously in Chinese or Japanese renderings of western ideas and then writing about them to a wide audience in China. Prior to 1900, China was intellectually very insulated from western ideas. According to Andrew Nathan, “for Chinese in the first years of this century, Liang's writings were the window on all that was modern and foreign and might be used to save China. He introduced new ways of thinking about literature, history, international relations, science, religion, language, the races of mankind, and the meaning of life” (Nathan 1985, p. 48). Liang was an incredibly prolific writer—one authority estimated his output at 14 million words (Wang 1965, p. 167), but very little of his writing has been translated into English. There is a vast literature of commentaries on his life and work, but these materials generally do not devote much attention to his economic ideas

Human capital theory has suffered much criticism. The filter theory of education (Arrow 1973), the theory of education as a “signal” (Spence 1973), and the theory of “screening” (Stiglitz 1975), for instance, have seriously challenged it from within mainstream economics, and heavy criticism has also come from other paradigms, with Franck Bailly (2016) recently documenting the critique from the radical school. Within this set of ideas that flourished in the post-WW II period and challenged human capital theory, John Kenneth Galbraith’s analysis of the dynamics of the education process is often neglected. In his original institutionalist and firm-based approach to the evolution of education, Galbraith placed great emphasis on the issue of the requirements of the planning system when he tackled the issue of human capital investment. More surprisingly—since he is unanimously recognized as the “founding father” of the “human capital revolution”—Theodore Schultz himself developed a substantial critique of human capital theory that shares some ground with Galbraith’s. The aim of this contribution is to provide new insights into the history of post-WW II ideas in the field of economics of education by reviewing Schultz’s and Galbraith’s respective analyses of education and highlighting their proximities. Both authors raise doubts regarding the idea that the aggregation of individual choices must be regarded as the relevant generative mechanism of the dynamic of education and the basis of the allocation of education resources. Consequently, both question the equivocal concept of student sovereignty.

The ninetieth birthday of Friedrich August von Hayek provides a timely opportunity to reflect upon his contributions to economic thought, not just as a part of the history of ideas but rather as a challenge to today's modes of theorizing.

At times economists seem to treat research into the history of their profession as a guilty pleasure, equating it with “the love that dares not speak its name,” to steal an expression from Oscar Wilde. As a field of research it retains at best an equivocal position. Should real economists waste their time amusing themselves with such a completely irrelevant and non-applicable field? This, at best, ambivalent attitude by a clear majority of the profession meant that the establishment of the first journal dedicated to this area of endeavor (History of Political Economy) served as the eagerly awaited signal for the most prestigious general journals to stop publishing articles of this nature. By the 1970s, the subject's relegation to the backwaters of the discipline translated into a generalized move to drop history of economic thought (as well as economic history) as a requirement of graduate education:

the history of thought, like all other fields, is well enough served by its own specialists. These were the reasons why Stigler proposed and supported the decision of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago to abandon its history of thought requirement in 1972, before many other departments did (Rosen 1993, p. 811).

Despite the transnational character of the Great Depression, there are few works in the interwar literature that deal with the propagation of business cycles across national borders and systemic risks of depression in the world economy. Two notable exceptions are Hans Neisser’s Some International Aspects of the Business Cycle (1936) and chapter 12 in Gottfried Haberler’s Prosperity and Depression ([1937] 1964), which carries the heading “International Aspects of Business Cycles.” Both works differ substantially from each other and from the modern way of thinking about international business cycles in open economy macroeconomics. Haberler’s and Neisser’s approaches help to identify relevant issues that have been lost from sight in modern open economy macroeconomics.

Before the publication of Ronald Coase’s “The Nature of the Firm,” new developments in the theory of the firm were under way in the works of Arnold Plant at the LSE, and Dennis Robertson, Frederick Lavington, and Austin Robinson among the Cambridge Marshallians. Although in disagreement on industrial policy, these economists shared the belief that the common view that bigger firms are always more efficient—a very popular view within the movement for industrial ‘rationalization’—was untenable from a theoretical point of view. In the works of these economists the ‘make or buy’ scheme is sometimes employed, and Coase’s idea of a cost for using the market can be found, in implicit form, in some writings of Plant that appeared before Coase’s article. But the fundamental principle that we now call “transaction costs” was hardly of any help to any of those who, at Cambridge as well as at the LSE, were insisting on the costs of coordination as a limit to the growth of the firm.

In eighteenth-century Italy a number of interesting efforts were made to apply mathematical methods to economic analysis. Scholars living in the Milan area were especially keen on mathematizing economic issues. R. D. Theocharis identified a common current of thought, which he called the Milanese School, in his pioneering research on early mathematical economics (Theocharis 1983, p. 2).

Although James Mill considered production and education to be two objectives of global welfare, he claimed that the former was not always consistent with the latter. On the one hand, production is necessary to provide humankind with the means of subsistence; on the other hand, if individuals allocate all their time to labor to the detriment of their own education, “neither intellect, virtue nor happiness can flourish upon the earth” (Mill [1819] 1825, p. 30). Mill argued that this problem might be solved by finding what he called “the precious middle point.” This point deserves special consideration: it acknowledges that there is a way in which education and production might be distributed in society in order to promote the greatest global welfare. The aim of this paper is to explain the relation between production and education through the working of the precious middle point.