This chapter examines the response of five prominent Swedish economists, David Davidson, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Knut Wicksell and Bertil Ohlin, to John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace and to the German reparations in the 1920s. When Keynes’s book appeared, Davidson and Cassel strongly endorsed it. Heckscher also agreed with Keynes in a long review entitled “Too Bad to Be True”. Inspired by his Malthusian view, Wicksell found the reparations feasible if only German population growth was arrested. The contacts between the Swedes and Keynes became close after Keynes’s book, in particular between Cassel and Keynes. The exchange of views took a new turn when Bertil Ohlin responded to an article by Keynes in The Economic Journal in 1929 on the transfer problem. The famous Keynes–Ohlin discussion laid the foundation for the analysis of the transfer problem, bringing Ohlin international recognition. We also trace how Davidson, Cassel and Heckscher changed their appreciation of Keynes in the 1930s with the publication of the General Theory while Ohlin viewed the message of Keynes in the 1930s as consistent with the policy views of the Stockholm school of economics.

This chapter examines the role of land in the history of political thought, specifically with regard to the concepts of value, productivity, natural harmony, and independence, and how, via the notion of the body as a universal materialist foundation, these have been conceptualised in the history of land reform agitation, both in Ireland and beyond. It examines the ideas and influence of key figures such as Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill, setting them in a much broader context of the long-standing tensions between liberal political economy and liberal individualism. The distinctiveness of land, based on the presumption of an individual natural right to life to which land was integral, formed the basis of this paradox in political thought. The chapter also analyses the place of land in Irish political economy, and the challenges faced by Irish economists in discarding references to moral purposiveness in economic thought.

What can a model of continence based in male physiology have to offer female writers? This chapter argues that the strong opinions that Vernon Lee expressed about sex and its relation to art in her early writing should not be dismissed as the result of repression or parental indoctrination, as they have been by previous critics. Lee, like Johnson, combined Paterian sensuous continence with other nineteenth-century discourses, particularly discussions of sexual health by New Women writers, and the result is central to her theorizing about life, social ethics, and art. She insisted on the harmfulness of sex to both individuals and society, and that those who felt otherwise were suffering from ‘logical misconception’. But Lee was also an aesthete, for whom sensuous experience was extremely important. She worried that continent aestheticism would limit an aesthete’s experience and lead to solipsism and waste. Her answer was a Paterian disciplined love, a reaching out to what is unhealthy and corrupt, whether people, places, or artworks, and learning to filter the good from the bad, to ‘cleanse and recreate it in the fire of intellectual and almost abstract passion’.

The principles of political economy that informed the Russell government’s measures to terminate the Famine crisis were broadly addressed in journalism, political and economic pamphlets, but also in literature. As this chapter shows, fiction, in particular, engaged with three aspects of political economy: the government’s politics of non intervention, the Malthusian discourses that many supporters of political economy employed and the stereotype of Irish indolence by which the ideology of political economy was often imbued. As will be demonstrated, the fact that these works of literature responded to these societal discussions on the Irish Question is accompanied by generic shifts. In examining the Famine present or past, these literary texts explored the boundaries of genre, developing new fictional registers and forms.