In his Presidential address to the American Economic Association, Gary Becker alludes to Thomas Malthus's “great contribution” (1988, p. 1) in a prologue to a wider exploratory discussion of some of the implications for macroeconomics flowing from recent programs in family economics. The content of the contribution as represented here (p. 2) includes diminishing returns to increases in employment “when land and other capital are fixed;” population growth positively related to the wage, the lower population growth at low wages turning on reduced birth rates (the preventive check) and increased death rates (the positive check); and a long-run equilibrium wage at which population is constant at a level determined by the production function. Becker emphasizes the stability of the equilibrium wage in the face of disturbances. A catastrophic reduction in population size (eg. the Black Death) and consequently a wage increase will be followed by positive population growth which restores both the wage and population size to their respective equilibrium levels. In the event of increases in the amount of usuable land, population size will become permanently higher with the wage ultimately reduced to its original long-run level. Becker represents Malthus as reaching “much more pessimistic conclusions about the long-term economic prospects of the average family” than, for example, Godwin and Condorcet who had maintained that the economic position of mankind will continue to improve over time.

When Walras's Market Models was published, a friend wrote to me that he hoped that it would stimulate research on Walras's work. I am very pleased that his wish is coming true. A number of writers have reexamined it from new perspectives. It is, perhaps, inevitable that the quality and tone of the texts is uneven, and it is to be hoped that in the future all Walrasian research can be done carefully, in good taste, in a dispassionate fashion, and without rhetorical devices and patronizing remarks. In any event, I have presented in my book the results of 30 years of study of Walras's work, and I invite the reader to contrast what I have written with differing expositions. I have nothing to add to those results at this time, except the data which follow.

The ninetieth birthday of Friedrich August von Hayek provides a timely opportunity to reflect upon his contributions to economic thought, not just as a part of the history of ideas but rather as a challenge to today's modes of theorizing.

In the last decade or so, intellectual historians have tried to alter and enhance our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment by situating the classic writings in the context of contemporary political debates and intellectual traditions. Two main approaches have emerged to date, tied to the themes of natural jurisprudence and civic humanism respectively. While both have much to offer to historians of economic thought, the present paper seeks to evaluate only the latter. It focuses in particular on civic humanist interpretations of the economic theories of David Hume and Adam Smith.

Are Pierre Leroux, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Leon Walras economists? Certainly, but to a different extent. This alphabetical order, which is also that of chronology, seems to be in inverse order of merit—at least in the opinion of Joseph A. Schumpeter, who praised Walras as “the greatest of all economists…as far as pure theory is concerned” (1954, p. 827), but who briefly described Proudhon as someone who defended “results that are no doubt absurd” (ibid., p. 457). Leroux's name does not even appear in Schumpeter's 1954 book, nor in any other history of economic thought. Although the judgment pronounced by a historian on one or another of our three authors may be contested, there seems no reason to call into question the hierarchy implicitly established by Schumpeter. In a certain way the succession: Leroux, Proudhon, Walras, represents and summarizes the development of political economy, beginning with the embryonic stage (which would be represented by Leroux), passing through the disorders of adolescence (Proudhon), and finally arriving at the stage of scientific maturity (Walras).

Liang Chi-chao (1873–1929) was a major figure in Chinese intellectual history around the turn of the century. Although he never learned to read any western language, Liang took on the role of an intellectual intermediary, reading voraciously in Chinese or Japanese renderings of western ideas and then writing about them to a wide audience in China. Prior to 1900, China was intellectually very insulated from western ideas. According to Andrew Nathan, “for Chinese in the first years of this century, Liang's writings were the window on all that was modern and foreign and might be used to save China. He introduced new ways of thinking about literature, history, international relations, science, religion, language, the races of mankind, and the meaning of life” (Nathan 1985, p. 48). Liang was an incredibly prolific writer—one authority estimated his output at 14 million words (Wang 1965, p. 167), but very little of his writing has been translated into English. There is a vast literature of commentaries on his life and work, but these materials generally do not devote much attention to his economic ideas

Quantitative techniques have received increasing attention in the history and methodology of economics. Nonetheless, a “text as data” approach has mostly been overlooked and its applicability to the history of economics remains to be examined. To understand what we gain from such quantitative techniques in relation to existing historical analyses, we apply some “text as data” techniques to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. We explore the books’ topics, styles, and sentiments. We show how word frequency analysis can be used to examine the differences between the books, shed light on conceptual discussions, and reveal an important stylistic aspect, specifically Smith’s use of personal pronouns. Style analysis shows the similarities and differences in terms of lexical richness and readability between the two books. We also show the limitations of a third technique, sentiment analysis, when applied to historical economic texts.

In 1951, Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief put his finger on what was wrong with economics. It had remained a “deductive system resting upon a static set of premises,” when what was needed was an economics that would “combine economic facts and theory.” The new economics would be called “interindustry” or “input-output” analysis (Leontief 1966, p. 14). According to Leontief it is easy to “compute the complete table of input requirements at any given level of output, provided we know its input ratios.” These input ratios could be calculated from “engineering data on process design and operating procedure” (ibid., pp. 24–26). For Leontief and, I suspect, a large number of economists in 1951, the technological facts dependent only on the chemical and physical laws of nature—what I shall call “Leontief coefficients”—were indisputable. It would take so many units of coke to produce a ton of pig iron whether or not there was a human being alive on earth to witness that transformation. The Leontief coefficients were the bedrock of subsequent economic analysis. They were analogous to what the philosopher John R. Searle has termed “brute facts” (Searle 1995, p. 27).

Two years after her success in the Moral Sciences Tripos (two examiners placed her in the First class and two in the Second), Mary Paley was asked to write an economics textbook for Extension Lecture students. On her engagement, the book became a joint effort with her fiance, later husband, Alfred Marshall. It was published in October 1879 and reprinted nine times between 1879 and 1891, including a revised edition in 1881. A third edition was worked on, probably around 1885, but not published. According to John Maynard Keynes, 15,000 copies of the book were sold in all (Pigou 1925, p. 500). Sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, Marshall rejected the book, criticizing its elementary nature and brevity—it was impossible, he felt, “to tell the truth for half-a-crown” (M. P. Marshall 1947, p. 22). When he sent his brother-in-law, E. D. Guillebaud, a complimentary copy of the Principles in 1890, Marshall stipulated that the Economics of Industry must be returned for destruction (Guillebaud 1961,2, p. 12, note c). In 1892 he produced a small book “made chiefly by scissors and paste out of my Principles,” which on its spine bore the title Economics of Industry.

Among the most controversial of David Ricardo's contributions to policy debate was his scheme for the redemption of the public debt by means of a “capital levy,” a one-time tax on the property of the nation. Public debt policy had been the subject of sporadic debate throughout the eighteenth century, but faced increased scrutiny by the time Ricardo came to address the subject. While government revenues were suffering from the repeal of the temporary income tax which had been imposed during the Napoleonic Wars, revenue requirements remained high, as the savings in terms of military expenditures were being offset by the need to make interest payments on a debt which had grown during the latter years of the war. Ricardo's analysis of public debt was not novel; nor was the proposal for a capital levy to achieve its redemption.

When William Stanley Jevons first presented his theory of exchange, he used the example of two trading bodies (A and B) holding stocks of corn and beef (goods X and Y), but he was eager to show how the basic results could be applied to a variety of situations. After considering the relatively simple introduction of transport costs, Jevons added three subsections (Jevons 1957, pp. 111–19) which demonstrated his confident handling of his approach. There have been many critical comments on Jevons's handling of mathematics, including those of Alfred Marshall in his review of the Theory of Political Economy (Jevons 1872; see Black 1981). However, these examples show that Jevons produced a clear and succinct statement of the mathematical structure of the theory of exchange.

In eighteenth-century Italy a number of interesting efforts were made to apply mathematical methods to economic analysis. Scholars living in the Milan area were especially keen on mathematizing economic issues. R. D. Theocharis identified a common current of thought, which he called the Milanese School, in his pioneering research on early mathematical economics (Theocharis 1983, p. 2).

Everyone has to eat, so agriculturalists must produce enough to feed themselves and the rest of the population. This statement is trivially obvious but making it explicit mattered to the early development of economic thinking. Many important economic writers of the period (Petty, Cantillon, Hutcheson, Hume, Steuart, Mirabeau, Smith, and others) used a specific notion of agricultural surplus of the form: x men can feed y, where y > x. A series of questions about the relation between agriculture and the rest of the economy naturally follows. Will the surplus be produced? How does it reach those who consume it? What are the “superfluous hands” (in Hume’s terms) to do? This paper points out this neglected theme in early economics.

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.

Polly Hill spent her long, productive, and at times controversial career crossing and contesting disciplinary boundaries. She graduated in economics at Cambridge, but her doctorate was in social anthropology—with economist Joan Robinson as dissertation supervisor. Her thirteen years at the University of Ghana were initially in economics, then in African studies, and her readership at Cambridge was in Commonwealth studies. As a woman in several male-dominated academic disciplines without a secure base in any (and with distinctive, unorthodox opinions in each), she never obtained a tenure-track appointment despite ten books and fifty scholarly articles. Her books drew attention to the underrecognized agency of indigenous entrepreneurs while her Development Economics on Trial: The Anthropological Case for the Prosecution (1986) critiqued a discipline, disciplinary boundaries, and outside experts, both mainstream and radical.

I wrote this address during the first weeks of the murderous and devastating invasion of Russia in Ukraine, in a fluctuating mood of anger and sadness. My aim was addressing the issue of the use of history to legitimize ideology, and I was contemplating how I could convince you of the urgency of this issue, and then this war broke out.

Clarence Ayres was a strong dissenting voice in US economics during the twentieth century. In the 1930s, a debate between Ayres and Frank Knight was published by the International Journal of Ethics. Although the debate focused on ethics, the evolution of economics was also discussed. This paper proposes an understanding of Ayres’s ideas based on the context in which he made them. This context is defined by the 1930s Ayres-Knight debate and the archival correspondence between Ayres and Knight during the 1930s.