Although Cournot’s mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid-1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts, even before his “discovery” by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce, a sophisticated mathematician. Peirce provides a subtle interpretation and anticipates Bertrand’s criticisms.

In an almost unreferenced article, Fitzhugh Carmichael (1928), writing of the period around the First World War, noted that “during the past twelve years many economic series have undergone what appears to be a permanent change in level.” These are prescient words that are widely applicable today. Carmichael noted that the then-standard practice of linear detrending was inappropriate in the presence of what we would now call “structural breaks”; as a result he proposed a method that would not only model a nonlinear trend, but would be suitable for situations where the transition from one regime to another was smooth. This study establishes the precedence of Carmichael’s ideas, re-examines his methods, and solves the problems that he thought would hinder wider applications of his approach, which has since become a central part of contemporary nonlinear econometric methods and for which Carmichael should be given credit.

Generations of readers have nodded in agreement with Adam Smith’s argument, in Book One of the Wealth of Nations, that a nation cannot be happy if the workers who constitute the majority of its population are miserable. Smith notes that equity, besides, demands that workers receive a generous recompense for their labor. I contend that this famous statement is best interpreted in light of contemporary arguments that it was socially useful for workers to be poor. Smith’s engagement with these arguments is usually interpreted with reference to the labor supply function, but I argue that it also involved deeper suppositions about the place of workers in the social order. Smith’s reaction to these suppositions enriches our understanding of his contribution to liberal economics.

In his attempt to improve Carl Menger’s economics, Friedrich von Wieser frequently discussed methodological issues. This paper proposes that Wieser’s epistemological position can be understood as the result of a reformulation of the empirical position that Menger (1871) developed in his Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre. This paper proposes four ways of interpreting Wieser’s concept of “experience”: i) experience stored in language, ii) experience as introspection, iii) experience as a mental experiment, and iv) experience as observation. Because Wieser applied the concept of “motivational power” derived from psychological induction in order to explain observable social phenomena, this paper calls his position “methodological motivationalism.” This particular position can help explain his later shift to sociological studies.

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.