Roger Backhouse (Backhouse 2004) has provided both an insightful deconstruction of dissent and a suggested terminology to deal with subtle distinctions within the domain of dissent, especially regarding the status of heterodoxy. There is more to be said, largely in expansion of his analyses—placing his analyses in a larger context. Section I summarizes Backhouse's position and Section II presents my own thoughts.

It is not every literary novice, blushing diffidently over her first manuscript, who easily finds a publisher, still less one prepared to pay an advance of several million pounds. But not every first author has such a story to tell as Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century. It was the previous record holder, Asquith, who first established the notion that retired prime ministers write their memoirs, and he did so under a twin motivation which was not peculiar to himself. He sought vindication and he was after the money.

Academic economists tend to come in two varieties. One type identifies a substantive specialism at the outset of a career and continues to cultivate it. A second type is more likely to respond to the American Economic Association's twice-a-decade requests for information about sub-specialties by providing a number of differing answers over the course of a professional lifetime. I accept Adam Smith's arguments about the gains from specialization arising from a widened division of labor, but I am also conscious that Smith held that excessive specialization could contribute to boredom in the workplace. In any event, I am temperamentally a Type II economist who has greatly enjoyed working on diverse scholarly topics. I am also aware of a number of turning points that have conditioned my world with consequences that I could not have foreseen.

As is well-known, Karl Marx distinguished three types of rent. In addition to two categories of differential rent, closely related to the Ricardian extensive and intensive margins, he argued (against David Ricardo) that rent was paid on the least fertile land. For Marx this so-called “absolute rent” resulted from the barrier posed by landed property to the free movement of capital into agricultural production. Since the organic composition of capital was relatively low in agriculture, the prices of production of farm products were lower than their labor values. The existence of private property in land prevented the reduction of agricultural prices to these prices of production, and allowed the payment of rent even on what could be described, in Ricardian terms, as marginal land. There exists a sizeable literature on Marx's theory of absolute rent,1 but there is no systematic account of its gestation and development. In this paper we explain how Marx's critique of Ricardian rent theory evolved between his first doubts early in 1851 and the articulation of a distinctive alternative analysis in the manuscripts of 1862–63. We also assess the influence exerted on Marx by Richard Jones and Johann Karl Rodbertus, and briefly discuss the significance of Marx's theory of absolute rent for his political economy as a whole.

Contributors to cobweb theory include many leading economists of the twentieth century. From early beginnings in 1930, cobweb theory played a key role in evolving perceptions of market stability arising from recursive linear models with endogenous dynamics. The focal point of this evolution in cobweb theory is the transition from naive to adaptive to rational price expectations. After a review of the prehistory, this paper examines the first wave of linear cobweb theory initiated by Jan Tinbergen, Henry Schultz, and Umberto Ricci and proceeds to consider the evolution of price expectations in the second wave of cobweb models associated with endogenous cycles in commodity markets. The role of modern cobweb theory in discussions about the stability of market equilibrium and the connection to processes with rational expectations is assessed.

As with most papers written for occasions of this kind, this one has elements of self-indulgence. In this Society, at least, one has a captive audience, some (or most?) of whom may have come for another purpose. At the same time, one has no prescribed theme: if one had one, one organised last year's meeting around it. True, there are constraints: it is after all the History of Economics Society, which constrains the subject somewhat–but only a little; it is an after dinner speech at the end of two long days of meetings, which limits the heaviness of the contents; and it will appear in the Bulletin, which prevents complete absurdities. Yet these constraints are fairly minimal.

Historians of economic thought typically have seen little or no connection between William Stanley Jevons's economic theory and policy issues. Wesley C. Mitchell, for example, suggested that Jevons had little interest in politics and was uncertain on the questions of the day. He was “basically interested in the subject [of economics] as a science and not as a means of bettering economic organization” (Mitchell 1969, pp. 31, 101-2). Mitchell's comments are curious in view of Jevons's extensive writings on public issues. His book, The State in Relation to Labour (1882), is considered a classic on the subject of policy and a rationalization for interventionist government. Jevons's pronouncement that “we can lay down no hard and fast rules, but must treat every case upon its merits” may well have marked the end of the “liberal era of principles,” according to F. A. Hayek (Hutchison 1978, pp. 100-101). Certainly Jevons intended as much.

Some years ago, George J. Stigler reminded the community of historians of economic thought that a great thinker of the last century, Adolphe Quetelet, had made a real methodological breakthrough in the social sciences by opening the door to quantification. Stigler himself tried to implement this method in the history of economic thought.

The present note is a development of a paper I presented some four years ago at the 1987 meeting of the History of Economics Society (Caravale 1987), and that was later published in Rivista di Politico Economica in an expanded version (Caravale 1988). The aim of these two writings was to emphasize that—contrary to what is often maintained—demand conditions play a fundamental role in classical and classical-type theories. This role is different from that played by demand in neoclassical theories (where equilibrium prices are determined by demand and supply functions), and is so to speak “internal” to the theory of natural equilibrium since it is connected with the definition, for each situation, of the Smithian “point of effectual demand.” Before turning to the specific object of this note, let me recall very briefly the main points of the general thesis developed in the above-mentioned papers.

In the late nineteenth century, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's magisterial work (1881) or capital and interest provided the foundation upon which virtually all modern theories are built. In his first volume, History and Critique of Interest Theories, Böhm-Bawerk classified and (in his mind) refuted all previous explanations. Böhm-Bawerk thought a proper theory of interest must explain the apparent undervaluation of future goods For example, if a machine is expected to yield annual rents of $1,000 for ten years why does it sell now for less than $10,000? To answer this question was to provide a theory of interest, for only with such an undervaluation would it be possible for a capitalist to invest in machines, for example, and reap a flow of returns, over time greater than his initial investment.

About three lines into his book Making Natural Knowledge, Jan Golinski defines the “constructivist” view of science as “that which regards scientific knowledge primarily as a human product, made with locally situated cultural and material resources, rather than as simply the revelation of a pre-given order of nature” (Golinski 1998, p. ix). Having a pretty good idea of what Professor Golinski's book was going to be about, this stopped me for a moment. Is that all there is to it? Is that what the work of the Strong Programme, Latour, Pickering, Knorr-Cetina; the talk of mangle, black boxes and resistances, is all about? Described this way, it seems quite reasonable; a way of thinking about scientific activity that should at least be given a hearing. Admittedly, I have seen other, usually more prolix, ways of characterizing what Golinski has called the constructivist view of science. But I like this one. It sends what I believe to be the correct message that this “constructivism” is, at its heart, better characterized as plausible and intriguing than outrageous, and that it is not necessarily threatening to any core values held by historians.

In 1933, Portugal was officially converted to a corporatist state, a state where it was accepted that the semi-autonomous bodies representing the various branches of economic and social activity would have formal powers in defining public policies. In such a context, an important change also occurred at the level of economic theories and doctrines, in keeping with the novelties emanating from both the legal and political fields.

This paper discusses the transition from a perspective in which the determination of income, output, and unemployment was seen as a part of the theory of the business cycle to one in which they are determined independently of the cycle, a transition that meant that the theory of output came to be more sharply separated from the theory of growth. In place of theories of the business cycle, which were rooted in structural changes associated with growth, business cycle theory came to be more of an adjunct to short-run theories. Whereas Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Maynard Keynes were already arguing in terms of the short run by the early 1930s, some American economists continued to think in terms of the business cycle until the very end of the 1930s. This paper shows that for Alvin Hansen and Paul Samuelson, both highly influential figures in postwar economics, the shift came about only because of the need to adduce structural factors to explain the recession of 1937–38 and wartime experience. The focus on income determination as the central macroeconomic problem in Samuelson’s textbook reflected the change in thinking that had happened during the 1940s.

This issue of JHET marks the end of one era and the beginning of another. Don Walker, the only editor that JHET has ever had, has stepped aside after 9 years on the job. Under Don's guidance, JHET developed into a highly respected outlet for scholarship in the history of economic thought, to the point where the supply of high quality submissions prompted the move to quarterly publication in 1988. His labors on behalf of the Journal stretched well beyond the standard editorial function: he handled or oversaw all aspects of the physical production of the Journal, the mailing of the Journal, and numerous other messy details that the present editor has the luxury of passing off to Carfax (that, too, largely owing to Don's efforts).

David Ricardo's “On Machinery” chapter continues to interest theorists and historians of economic thought (Blaug 1958, Hollander 1979, Kurz 1984, Samuelson, 1988, 1989, Morishima 1989, Negishi 1990). Yet the addition of the chapter to the third edition of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation arguably overturns much of the view for which Ricardo is so well known (Davis 1989). In the added chapter Ricardo allows, contrary to his original view in the first two editions, that the introduction of machinery is indeed injurious to the class of laborers. More interestingly, because machinery substitutes for labor, wages cannot rise and profits are no longer threatened by rising rents. Effectively the contest between capitalists and landlords of the first two editions of the Principles is replaced in the final edition by one between capitalists and laborers. However, not only does the “On Machinery“ chapter substantially change the distributional argument customarily attributed to the Principles, but it also permits an examination of Ricardo's thinking about distribution in two distinct, but related frameworks. The discussion here compares the distributional analysis in the first two editions with that of the third to explain the general nature of the Ricardo's theory of profit. It does so by providing a novel interpretation of Ricardo's characterization of profit as a residual, and by emphasizing the historical context in which distribution occurred in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

There is an on-going controversy on the interpretation of David Ricardo's wage theory, which has undoubtedly been fueled by the existence of contradictions and difficulties in Ricardo's own treatment of wages. The aim of this paper is to clarify the sources of these difficulties, and to trace their possible historical and analytical reasons. To this end, Ricardo's contribution is put in historical context, and compared with the received doctrine of his time, that is, with Adam Smith's wage theory. This comparison shows that there are many Smithian elements in Ricardo, and that the problems emerge when Ricardo departs from Smith. These problems are essentially the coexistence of Smithian and Ricardian notions of the natural wage in Ricardo's work and the difficulties in reconciling the latter with the distinction drawn by Ricardo between natural and market variables. The reason.for Ricardo's partial departure from Smith, it will be argued, may have been his wish to render more clear-cut his conclusions concerning the tendency of the profit rate to fall in consequence of a rising price of corn. The effort to clarify the difficulties in Ricardo's theory and the comparison with Smith also entail an interpretation that differs in important respects from those found on both the main sides of the controversy over his wage theory.

To declare my case “not proven” is irrelevant. I agree my case is not proven, but all other cases on this topic, including Ahiakpor's, are equally unproven. Arguing about proof here is a waste of time. We simply do not have enough data for deductive certainty or even for the less stringent criterion of “proof beyond reasonable doubt.” The written record is not conclusive and the protagonists are dead. What is not a waste of time, however, is discussing probabilistic inferences from incomplete evidence.