This paper, in a roundabout way, deals with Alfred Marshall's views on method, examining the metaphors, similes, and analogies by which they were expressed; or, conversely, it investigates his use of metaphors as a means to convey methodological reflections. Marshall's biological analogy has aroused much controversy in the past; it is to be hoped that a more comprehensive investigation will allow us to place the metaphors/method relationship in a wider context.

Irving Fisher is renowned as the pundit who declared in October 1929 that stock prices appeared to have reached a permanently high plateau and who, having amassed a net worth of ten million dollars in the boom of the 1920s, proceeded to lose eleven million dollars of that fortune in the crash, which, as John Kenneth Galbraith (1977, p. 192) remarked, “was a substantial sum, even for an economics professor.” Along with the Dow-Jones index, Fisher's reputation for understanding financial markets declined relative to that of Roger Babson, the stock forecaster, amateur economist, and founder of Babson College, who presciently predicted the stock market crash of autumn 1929 (and, with less prescience, the stock market crashes of 1926, 1927, and 1928, and the stock market recovery of 1930). An editorial in The Commercial and Financial Chronicle (November 9, 1929) declared of Fisher: “The learned professor is wrong as he usually is when he talks about the stock market” (quoted by Galbraith 1972, p. 151).

In The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes lumped together the marginalist and neoclassical economics of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the more narrowly defined “classical” economics of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, J. R. McCulloch, James and John Stuart Mill and other mainstream economists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth into what he called the “classical theory of employment,” which he reduced to two “fundamental postulates”:

(a) The wage is equal to the marginal product of labour…

(b) The utility of the wage when a given volume of labour is employed is equal to the marginal disutility ofthat amount of employment…(Keynes 1936, p. 5).

Since Moses Abramovitz's “classic” paper on “Catching-Up, Forging Ahead, and Falling Behind” (1986) economists have become increasingly aware again of the significance of “social capability” for processes of economic change. During the past twenty years much research has been done on “soft” determinants of development and growth. Especially some of the so-called new institutionalists and evolutionary economists have now returned to the roots of the institutional research program by acknowledging that “ideas matter” in the process of institutional change. However, it is still often overlooked in the literature that the cognition of social reality is deeply intertwined with the general world-view prevailing in a given society. Certainly, such general world-views are partly determined by the level of economic and technological development, but they are also a reflection of deeply rooted cultural traditions. In particular, the highly divergent outcomes of economic and political transition in the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe have brought the connection between culture, ideas, and institutions to the fore again (see, for example, Winiecki 2004). Therefore it is all but an accident that it is one of the leading transition experts who has recently called on economists to “seek a better understanding of the role of values and norms in shaping both ideas and institutions” (Roland 2004, p. 128).

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).

Public concern over the so called “trust problem” in the United States between the end of the nineteenth century and 1914, the year of the passage of the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Acts, was reflected in the considerable contemporary literature on the subject. Not surprisingly, professional economists actively participated in this debate. Their thinking directly and indirectly influenced the legislation of 1914 in a way that cannot be said of the Sherman Act of 1890 (Mayhew 1998). A survey of the most important of these professional writings shows that, among the several voices animating the discussion, John Bates Clark's was perhaps the most influential. In this connection, Joseph Dorfman argues that John Bates Clark's second edition of his Control of Trusts (1912), co-authored with his son John Maurice, “played a formative historical role in policy making, for it provided the most systematic exposition of the view on trusts, that was embodied in 1914, at President Woodrow Wilson's urging, in the Clayton Act and the FTC Acts.” “From this standpoint,” continues Dorfman quite emphatically, “The Control of Trusts caught the dominant reform interest and in turn became a contributing force in shaping the trend of the socio-economic development of the nation” (1971, p. 17). Apart from the 1912 monograph, John Bates Clark devoted considerable attention to the problems of trusts and industrial combinations during much of his career, both in his professional writings and in his frequent contributions to newspapers and popular reviews.