In the middle of the eighteenth century, in less than fifteen years,1 there occurred, principally in France, a veritable transformation in the conceptions of space and its elements. Up to that time, space had been thought of primarily as social and political.

In the aftermath of the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution, the years 1920–1925 witnessed a great upsurge of academic writing in Britain on Karl Marx's theory of value. We shall not seek to explain this phenomenon but it may nevertheless be of interest first to sketch, as a contrasting background, the limited interest shown in this topic in the pages of the Economic Journal, 1891–1920. For that journal did indeed, in that period, devote considerable space to matters socialist—taken in a broad sense (see Steedman 1990).

Erik Lundberg, 1907 to 1987, was the last and one of the best of the 1930s vintage of Stockholm School economists. His Studies in the Theory of Economic Expansion, hereafter cited as Studies, represented a significant advance in dynamic theorizing but has scarcely received any attention outside Sweden. The purpose of this essay is acquaint modern economists with Lundbergs achievement.

John Richard Hicks is famous for the contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare economics that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1972 and for his interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory (1936). Hicks made these pathbreaking contributions to economic modeling in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Following Axel Leijonhufvud's classification (1984, p. 28), these are the works of “Hicks the Younger.” “Hicks the Elder” formulated “Some Questions of Time in Economics” (Hicks 1976). There he refers to theories that adequately incorporate aspects of time as “economic theory in time” in contrast to “economic theory out of time.” Hicks argues that for the theory of capital and the theory of markets this distinction is of greatest importance (ibid., p. 139).

The article analyzes the economic entries of the main Spanish general encyclopedias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Diccionario enciclopédico (1887–1898) and Enciclopedia universal (1908–1930). Both works include the contributions of prestigious Spanish and Latin American intellectuals, and were designed for distribution in Spain and Latin American markets. Diccionario enciclopédico was the first to introduce the “social question” in its economic entries, which were drafted by the most outstanding Spanish economists at the time. These entries were characterized by the absence of any significant mention of historicism and marginalism, which illustrates the isolationism of Spanish economists during the late nineteenth century. Enciclopedia universal, on the other hand, was not entirely drafted by academic economists. Nevertheless, its economic entries account for a complete outline of marginalism, Marxism, and historicism. Apart from the traditional goals of compiling the intellectual advances made in any area of human knowledge for educational purposes, the economic entries of both encyclopedias aimed at popularizing some kind of economic knowledge in order to prepare minds for the reception of specific doctrines and agendas: the secular social doctrine of Spanish Krausism and the religious Social Catholicism, respectively.

This paper intends to provide a comprehensive and critical survey of the valuable but neglected contributions of Fritz Machlup to the debate on the Transfer Problem. Machlup took three different and conflicting lines of approach to the problem in the course of his lifelong study of it. The third, which is of a basically monetary character, provides original results, especially in relation to the demand-oriented and quantitative approach that dominates in the standard literature.

Fr. John A. Ryan (1869–1945) was one of the early advocates of minimum wage laws in the United States. The thesis of this paper is that in three respects Fr. Ryan stood apart from other advocates of the minimum wage. First, during the period of his work, economics was developing on the basis of the positivist conception of science. Fr. Ryan’s case for the minimum wage combined economics with “non-scientific” theology and philosophy. Second, most religiously motivated American reformers were Protestants, and their advocacy was grounded in the Protestant Social Gospel movement. This was different from Fr. Ryan’s grounding in the social encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, which themselves were grounded in the Catholic Church’s constant teaching that man is made in the image of God. Third, many reformers were motivated not at all by religion, but by the utilitarian calculus that had become the foundation of the social sciences. Although Fr. Ryan made utilitarian judgments in his analysis, he was not an ethical utilitarian.

A recent comparative study of the economists' participation in government, draws negative conclusions with respect to this profession in Italy. The Italian case was shown to have been weak both in the teaching of economics at University level and lacking in the provision of a clearly defined and a highly specialized academic training. The complaint that Italian economists were generally devoted to teaching microeconomics, rather than macroeconomics, which is more strongly linked to political and productive demands, has often been heard.

In contrast to the common maxims for good taxation, Antonio De Viti de Marco revolutionized public finance studies by placing collective economic activity within a theoretical framework and trying to explain concrete fiscal phenomena such as tax incidence or public debt. The polar cases of cooperative and monopolistic states and the state factor of production are usually considered characteristics of such a framework. Here, we remark that De Viti’s theory of the cooperative state appears grounded only on the principles of minimum means and of political competition, and on the assumption that individual income is a proxy of individual consumption of general public services. Thus, it appears that the characteristics might be inessential to the real core of his theoretical framework. Moreover, we claim that his theoretical framework was not actually applied in his explanation of concrete fiscal phenomena. Finally, we remark that he seldom employed marginal tools in his Principî.

In the early twentieth century, an economic doctrine known as “non-proletarianization theory” became influential among left-wing Zionists in Russia. According to this theory, Jewish workers were unable to “proletarianize”—that is, to integrate large-scale industry; hence, Jewish territorial autonomy was required, whether in Palestine or elsewhere. This article analyzes this theory’s historical development, focusing on the works of three authors: Haim Dov Horovitz, Yakov Leshchinsky, and Ber Borochov. I claim that discussions of Jewish non-proletarianization can be considered a specific and coherent intellectual tradition in the history of economic thought. I also discuss these theories’ relation to the anti-sweatshop campaign of the Progressive Era, particularly John R. Commons’s writings on Jewish immigrants that were recently debated in this journal.

The article examines Sparta’s influence on the treatment of luxury and wealth in early-modern republican thought, analyzing three key thinkers: Francesco Guicciardini, Montesquieu and Abbé de Mably. In this view, unnecessary wealth and, particularly, consumption over a certain limited level, is a pernicious extravagance that harms virtue and leads to corruption of the commonwealth that allows it. Both the direct influence of the Spartan example and the correlative Platonic ideal, inspired by the Lacedaemonians, are analyzed; the influence of Plutarch is emphasized. Special attention is given to the distinction between the Platonic account, with the twin dangers of both wealth and poverty, and a simpler, binary opposition of virtuous poverty vs. corrupting wealth. Guicciardini’s and Mably’s views are closely examined; for Montesquieu, the article traces the decisive role Plato plays in Montesquieu’s account of luxury, and analyzes his almost unknown work, Dialogue de Xantippe, showing the importance of Sparta for Montesquieu’s idea of republic.

The integration of money into the Walrasian general equilibrium scheme is an age-old and intricate issue. One of the first attempts was made by Gustavo Del Vecchio, who, in the early twentieth century, built a theory of circulation that considered money as a medium of exchange, and investigated its organizational and social aspects in depth. Del Vecchio developed a theory of monetary service grounded on the distinction between individual and social utility of money. Moreover, he stated that money, credit, accumulation, and crisis could no longer be theorized with time omitted, and this induced him to formulate dynamic statements that put forward claims about money as a store of value. The organizational and social dimensions of money, time, and uncertainty were all important and interconnected aspects in Del Vecchio’s scientific inquiry, for they all sprang from his conceptualization of money as a medium of exchange.

For those readers who are not familiar with the history of Italian economic thought, the Cost of Reproduction Doctrine (CRD) is an interpretation ofthe theory of value developed by the distinguished scholar Francesco Ferrara (1810–1900) around the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a time when many of the flaws of the classical system had been identified but the analytical tools needed for their elimination were not yet available.

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.