Oswald ‘Foxy’ Falk was the enigmatic figure who understood, probably more than any other person, how the mind of Maynard Keynes operated. Regrettably, Falk never wrote a memoir on Keynes or even expanded upon his long professional association with him. Equally, there has been relatively little written of Falk in the economics literature. This article attempts, at least, to address that gap. The character and philosophy of Falk are examined through the prism of a lengthy correspondence he had with another businessman who knew Keynes, William Sydney Robinson. Their letters reveal why Keynes fell out with his former business partner but also, more importantly, how, in talking about the great and the good, lesser mortals are inclined to tell the occasional mistruth.

In “On the Concept of ‘Felicitas Publica’ in Eighteenth-Century Political Economy,” a recent paper in this journal, Federico D’Onofrio strongly criticizes the interpretation that Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni have offered of the eighteenth-century Neapolitan tradition of civil economy and public happiness, as articulated by Antonio Genovesi. D’Onofrio claims that Bruni and colleagues have not fully explored the political meaning of public happiness within eighteenth-century economics, and that Bruni unfairly criticized methodological individualism on the basis of the intrinsically social character of happiness. This paper is a reply to D’Onofrio.

In April 1909 Léon Walras (1834–1910) presented his last lecture before the Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles at Lausanne. The subject dealt with in this lecture was the analogy between the mathematics used in economics and that employed in mechanics; it is reformulated in what turned out to be one of Walras's last publications, entitled ‘Economique et Mécanique.’

This paper addresses the question: How did the promising program set out in Leon Walras' mature writings come to be taken as laying the ground for a totally different line of problems in his later writings and in modern microeconomic theory? The study of Walras' mature work (see Walker, 1996) offers an instructive object lesson in the way in which an interesting line of enquiry leads gradually to analytical difficulties and then to “solutions” that evade issues and constitute a major diversion of analysis down roads not initially contemplated by its originator. This paper attempts to trace the development of that detour from the main road of economic analysis in Walras' mature work to the side road of abstract exercises in contemporary neowalrasian literature.

The scholastic intellectual tradition was the dominant scientific paradigm for nearly five centuries in western Europe. That the economic issues of interest to these scholars were similar throughout the period is undisputable, but were the individual views on these issues also similar? This is a pertinent question, upon which an evaluation of the evolution of this intellectual tradition, which often has been considered as monolithic, can be based.

This paper focuses on the analysis of the so-called “natural law case” against usury, and tracks how the lines of intellectual reasoning subtly evolved between early and late scholastics. While the issues, methods, and purposes of scholastic thought remained the same in this period, there also was a systematic evolution within this tradition that makes the essence of the scholastic doctrines conformable to economic realities.

Through the 1930s, Frank H. Knight engaged the economic profession in a prodigious exchange over the nature and productivity of capital. Knight's efforts here were driven by three significant objectives: first, that capital theory had to be able to explain the broad fact of capital accumulation and growth as actually experienced by progressive societies; second, that existing doctrines had to be purged of the flawed vestiges of the classical-Ricardian theory of production if any progress was to be had in achieving the first objective; third, and last, that an alternative theory of capital needed to provide an explanation of the productivity of capital consistent with the fulfillment of the first two tasks. Knight failed in the third task or, at best, left the task incomplete.

The basic principles of Robbins's Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science are still present in most textbooks in economics. We thus face a combined problem of historical and contemporary nature. Robbins's assertion concerning the ethics–economics relationship has two main difficulties. Firstly, the presumption of means–ends analysis, which is oblivious of the ends people seek to promote, is not as neutral as it appears. Robbins chooses to ignore the ends by focusing on cost minimization. This implicitly (though not inherently) suggests another end—wealth, or means, maximization—which by no means can be considered as ethically neutral. Secondly, there is an implicit assumption that whatever the ends people seek to promote, there will always be a coordinated outcome to their actions. As competitive prices are the means to achieve waste minimization (through proper pricing by opportunity costs), the assumed coordination must be that of general equilibrium and, thus, cooperative-based coordination must be excluded.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman's work is never done and often not counted. It is a fact equally universally acknowledged that most people in the economics profession are not terribly interested in such a fact. It is my purpose to explore this lack of interest by tracing it to the place of sexual division of labor in Adam Smith's work.

Just over a century ago two noteworthy books in economics were published by women, contrary to the widespread modern impression that women's participation in economics is a recent phenomenon. Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Women and Economics (1898a, cf. Gilman 1898b), a landmark work of feminist and institutionalist economics (see M. A. Dimand 1995b). Rosa Luxemburg published The Industrial Development of Poland (1898) based on her 1897 Zurich doctoral dissertation. This distinguished contribution showed promise of the great abilities displayed in her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), a study that deserves recognition for its importance in macrodynamics and the theory of economic growth as well as in Marxian economics (see Joan Robinson's introduction to the 1951 translation). These two authors stand as giants in the history of economics–or would do so, if historians of economics were paying attention–but they were very far from being the only women contributing to economics in the 1890s.

When François Quesnay began to publish on economics there were unmistakable indications that fundamental change was required in France. The finances of the State were in perpetual difficulty, and it had to borrow at higher interest rates than the private sector. Paris was the intellectual capital of Europe, and France was unquestionably one of Europe's great powers, but she had difficulty in simultaneously financing the Army and the Navy, which her international ambitions required. In the repeated wars with Great Britain in what has been described as the Second Hundred Years War (dating from 1688 until 1815) military weaknesses under the Bourbons associated with inadequacies of finance hampered France's efforts to match Britain in the colonization and exploitation of the wealth of North America and India. In the absence of representative institutions such as the British Parliament, the wealthy in France would not consent to the taxation required to establish the French State on a financial foundation commensurate with its political aspirations.

In a series of papers, Mark Blaug has accused modern, mainstream economic theory of sterility because of the abandonment of “competition as a process,” tracing the cause to the Formalist Revolution of the 1950s. The paper agrees with the criticism but disagrees on the cause, which is, rather, to be found in the shift from the treatment of capital as a single factor of variable ‘form’ to a Walrasian specification of the capital endowment as a given vector, a datum incompatible with the role of equilibrium as a center of gravitation of time-consuming adjustments. The shift was due, as shown by Pierangelo Garegnani, to unease in the 1930s with the conception of capital as a single factor, a fact neglected by Blaug but historically evident and a cause of great uncertainty in capital theory in subsequent decades. The conclusion is that, to avoid the sterility of neo-Walrasian equilibria, one cannot return to Alfred Marshall with his inconsistent notion of capital as a single factor, but Blaug himself indicates another possible direction.

My comments on the papers given by Bob Coats, Roger Backhouse, and Sheila Dow will focus on the history and prospects of institutional economics, as that is the part of the heterodox world I know most about.

This paper focuses on the teachings and admonitions regarding wisdom found in the sixth edition of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). Following a mind-path marked by the seminal contributions of Glenn Morrow (1923), Donald Winch (1978), and Laurence Dickey (1986), the paper offers an interpretation of the higher moral standard (superior prudence) introduced by Smith in the last edition of TMS, as his response to the socio-economic and cultural changes that took place in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. Between the first and last editions of TMS the taste for luxury and conspicuous consumption became widespread and contagious both geographically and across ranks. Prudence and other-approbation, sufficient gatekeepers of moral conduct and character in the previous editions of TMS, became progressively less effective in keeping society away from moral deception and in regulating reputation and the distinction of ranks. The paper examines the introduction of superior prudence in the last edition of TMS as Smith’s vision of a dialectical process between external and internal approbation that is capable of transforming individual dependence on social praise into a dialogue between materialistic and moral concerns, which would lead to a progressively wiser, although conflictual, existence.

From 1759 to 1762, François Quesnay regularly appealed to Charles Richard de Butré (1725–1805) when he had to make numerical estimates or perform non-elementary computations (Charles and Théré 2008). Although scarcely mentioned in the secondary literature, Butré was indeed an important collaborator of Quesnay’s. The present article gives a detailed account of Butré’s contribution to Physiocracy by concentrating on the period from 1766 to 1768, when Quesnay conceived and published his last versions of the Tableau économique. We show that Butré developed a sophisticated economic model. Although his model contains significant deviations from Quesnay’s, Butré’s intent was to complement rather than criticize it.

The continual interaction between economic change and economic policies designed to manage or guide this change seldom finds such dramatic expression as when one type of economy replaces another, e. g., when the industrial economy replaces the agrarian or is in turn supplanted by the “post-industrial” economy.

Thus, when the American economy was in the thick of its industrial revolution during the decades around the turn of this century, it was subjected to a series of government interventions the lowest common denominator of which has been summarized in the title of a book by Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy (1996). In the United States as in all other countries, these interventions consisted of a glorious jumble of attempts to solve problems as they arose, of “bespoke jobs” in response to diverse economic interests, and of sundry ideologically-motivated efforts to move events in particular directions.