Antonio De Viti de Marco is perhaps the most representative scholar at the origin of the Italian tradition in Public Finance, and his main work has been at the disposal of English-speaking economists since 1936 (De Viti de Marco 1936). However, at the time he was not particularly appreciated: his book had at the time one good and one bad review, but certainly left no mark on mainstream economic analysis. The fact is that De Viti's message was too far beyond the range of interests of Anglo-Saxon writers of the time.

In 1922, Thomas Edison publicly introduced his latest invention—a new type of money, a commodity-backed currency that he believed was the long-term solution to America's monetary woes. “I want to cast the variable out of money. This gold money is not good enough. It's a fiction” he boldly proclaimed (New York Times 1922).

The early literature on ordinalism and Vilfredo Pareto's incomplete development of ordinal theory, by John R. Hicks and R. G. D. Allen (1934), Oskar Lange (1934), Hicks (1939), George Stigler (1950), Paul A. Samuelson (1974) and others, referred exclusively to Pareto's more mature French language works: the Manuel d'Économie Politique (1909) or the subsequent encyclopaedia entry entitled “Économie Mathématique” (1911). The related discussion considered whether Pareto was an inconsistent ordinalist, a cardinalist, or confused.

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).

Vishnugupta Chanakya Kautilya wrote a treatise called The Arthashastra, which means “science of wealth.” It contains three parts, which deal with issues related to economic development, administration of justice, and foreign relations. It has 150 chapters, which are distributed into fifteen books. Book three, which has twenty chapters and book four, which has thirteen chapters, are devoted to the administration of justice. Kautilya's Judicial System called “Dandaniti,” “the science of law enforcement” is an important part of The Arthashastra. Kautilya codified, modified, and created new laws related to: loans, deposits, pledges, mortgages etc., sale and purchase of property, inheritance and partition of ancestral property, labor contracts, partnership, defamation and assault, theft and violent robbery, and sexual offenses. He dealt with law and justice issues relating to both the civil law and the criminal law. He offered a truly comprehensive system of justice, which not only incorporated all the salient elements of a twenty-first century system but also contained a few additional invaluable insights.

This paper aims to detail Frisch’s choice of setting the accelerator principle at the core of his impulse-propagation model (1933a), referred to as the “rocking horse model.” The innovative aspects of this model rest not only on the rise of macrodynamics regarding the equilibrium concept but also on the reformulation of business cycles in terms of production of capital goods. This is a deliberate choice, which relies on his work on business cycles started in 1927, and can be obviously traced back to his debate with John Maurice Clark and the American Institutionalists, but relies more deeply on a specific appropriation of Norwegian approach to this principle.

Though beauty of diction, harmony of periods, and acuteness and singularity of sentiment, may captivate the reader, yet there are other qualifications essentially necessary…. Fidelity, accuracy and impartiality are also requisite (Joseph Towers, Observations on Mr. Hume's History (1778)).

The popular view among many contemporary economists is that our predecessors were literate but not numerate. Their myopia is curious to those who have the benefit of greater historical perspective. Many early practitioners of political economy can be credited with recognizing that, by their very nature, the problems in which they were interested required them to measure, quantify and enumerate. From the seventeenth century onwards, inquiring minds had already learned to distrust information and ideas that derived from the then traditional qualitative approach to science, which described the sensations associated with objects and events. William Petty's Political Arithmetic is a case in point; it aimed not simply to record and describe reality in terms of

Classical political economy in Great Britain was broadly supportive of education, but limited government’s role to modest assistance for charitable schools. The early classical economists in the United States, men like Thomas Cooper and Francis Wayland, in addition to supporting free trade, took this classical position with respect to education. But a more aggressive democratic claim was being advanced by the American common school movement and its supporters among Whig protectionists. The early economic tracts of William Jennison, Willard Phillips, Calvin Colton, and Henry Carey envisioned a larger role for government and advocated support for publicly financed common schools. Most notably, the leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann, built a defense for public financing based on a radical theory of property, derived from distinctly Puritan economic doctrine. If his radical positions received little support from post-Civil War mainstream economists, Mann’s practical advocacy of public taxation for public schools very much carried the day.

The investigation of aggregate consumption underwent a radical change in the USA during the 1940s and 1950s. Principles deriving from the American Institutionalist tradition attained their greatest popularity in Duesenberry’s formulation just before they were rapidly abandoned. This paper examines this turning point by comparing Duesenberry’s relative income hypothesis and Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis. This also makes it possible to identify a particular feature of Duesenberry’s analysis—its heterogeneity—which must be taken into consideration by those seeking a return to Institutionalist principles in the analysis of aggregate consumption.

It is noted that Harry G. Johnson was widely admired for his broad knowledge of economics, and particularly for the excellence and synthesizing quality of much of his writing. His discussions of the Phillips curve and related matters are considered. It is found that they are brief, inaccurate, and inconsistent. It is clear that, despite his reputation, they should not be treated as authoritative. It is further suggested that rather than supposing that Johnson’s knowledge and capabilities have been grossly exaggerated, it may be better to conclude that the Phillips curve was not nearly so important in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s as has been supposed.

This paper reconsiders the anteriority of Robert Torrens’s theory of natural wage to that of David Ricardo. Ricardo was influenced by Torrens’s thinking when writing the chapter on “Wages” of the Principles. For many historians of economic thought, this influence is limited to Torrens’s focus on the socio-cultural aspect of necessity goods, which determine the natural price of labor. While this interpretation is consistent with that of Ricardo, we argue that the anteriority of Torrens to Ricardo more generally focuses on the method used by the latter to justify the indexation of money wages on the money price of subsistence goods. Finally, this paper shows that the tribute paid to Torrens by Ricardo paradoxically explains posterity’s misunderstanding of his theory.

Most discussions of how one should write the history of economics are conducted at a very abstract level. They debate the merits of alternative approaches without relating them to specific problem-situations or specific periods. The literature uses terms such as “absolutism,” “relativism,” “Whig history,” “thick history,” “historical reconstructions,” “rational reconstructions,” and “presentism,” frequently arguing that one of these approaches is better than one or more of the others. In warning historians of economics against sin, they typically define sin in absolute terms. This is particularly true of those who argue for “relativism,” “thick history,” “historical reconstructions” and the like. There is a simple reason for this. Terms such as “absolutism,” “Whig history,” and “presentism” all carry negative connotations, with the result that their advocates usually feel impelled to qualify them. On the other hand, supporters of “historical reconstruction,” “thick history” and so on feel much less pressure to offer such qualifications—the words used have the sound of “real” history. The terminology itself is value-laden.

In this essay we are going to closely analyze the importance of Allyn A. Young's theory of increasing returns. In truth, we could also discuss his position on economies of scale, in that the analytical definitions suggested by the theory, as we shall shortly see, are not that helpful in understanding exactly what this writer meant by (the principle of) increasing returns: in fact, the latter are always linked to the more general, all-pervasive concept of economic progress, as is evident from the title of his most famous work. Young's contribution to the debate (one only has to think of the cost controversy of the 1920s) over returns and economies (and diseconomies) of scale, was in truth somewhat marginal. His only work that dealt with these questions, besides his 1928 celebrated paper (Young 1928), dates back to 1913, when in an important critical note (Young 1913), which we shall briefly analyze in section 2, he criticized a number of economic policy rules deriving from Arthur C. Pigou's (1912) famous work. To put it more precisely, Young did not have any substantial role to play in the construction and perfection of the neoclassical theoretical paradigm; in fact, as we argue in section 3, there is significant evidence to suggest that he was probably moving increasingly further away from such a position. The essence of Young's work, summarized in the article written in 1928, would seem to consist in the request for a theoretical redirection, in the analysis of the dynamics of capitalist economies, along the lines of some of the classical economists, thus carrying the various suggestions on this matter already present in Alfred Marshall's theoretical contribution to extremes. In sections 4 and 5, dedicated to the discussion of this article and of its appendix respectively, we maintain that the logic of Young's analysis is based on a multi-sectoral model subject to qualitative and quantitative transformations, i.e., to structural change. Such a view enables us to understand: (1) the author's emphasis on the proportionality among different productive branches needed in order to ensure balanced economic expansion; (2) the attempt (made by the author in the appendix to his 1928 article) to explain the dynamics of the economic system in the presence of different intersectoral growth rates. In the concluding section we maintain that it is the alternative nature of his position compared with the “standard theory”—the reference here is particularly to Pigou's transcription of Marshall's economics—that represents the main feature of Young's work.

A principal objective of Malthus, Ricardo, and Marx was to discover the laws that regulate and limit the growth of the wealth of nations and, in particular, the unprecedented growth of capitalism. The central theme of this paper is that their productive and unproductive labor concepts are critical to understanding their analyses of capitalist growth and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall which regulates and limits this growth. The way in which they identify productive and unproductive labor and how they apply this distinction is critical to understanding the common thread that runs through and marks the differences between them.

I found preparing this presidential address a much greater challenge than I had anticipated. After much deliberation, I decided to explore the historical roots of what we are doing now. The History of Economics Society, like other learned societies, holds an annual conference in different cities; members present papers which are discussed; and the Society sponsors a specialist journal—The Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Why? Where did this tradition begin? I turned to several historians of science—I. Bernard Cohen, Thomas S. Kuhn, Richard Yeo, and Ian Hacking—for some background.