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.

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.

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.

Like other Progressive Era reformers, Thomas Nixon Carver promoted a form of biology-infused social science that included both eugenics and a strong version of hereditarianism. Carver was also a charismatic teacher who trained several generations of economists and sociologists at Harvard. In this paper we will focus on the contribution of three of them: James A. Field, Norman E. Himes, and Carl S. Joslyn. These authors differ in terms of style, method, and emphasis—with Field and Himes more interested in population and birth control issues, and Joslyn in the dynamics of social stratification. As it will be shown below, however, all of them reveal an explicit commitment to hereditarianism and eugenics, which can be directly traced back to Carver’s influence during their student days at Harvard.

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.

As Kenneth Arrow has pointed out in a recent paper, “David Ricardo was a peaceful man” (Arrow 1991, p. 70). Indeed he was—during his lifetime. I am not so sure he is resting peacefully given the further assertion that his system was “a bold attempt to determine values independent of demand considerations” (ibid., p. 75). Arrow adds, byway of qualification, that he does “not think, as some neo-Ricardians seem to, that there was in any sense an intended repudiation of the demand schedule”; rather Ricardo did not conceive of such a schedule even though “some of [his] analysis can only be made sensible on the basis of such a concept.”

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.

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.

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).

Aleksander Bilimovich (1876–1963) is often considered to have been one of the last representatives of the Kiev School of economics, which was influenced by the German Historical School as well as by the emerging neoclassical theory. After the Soviet revolution, Bilimovich continued his work in exile and was developing his theoretical and methodological views along two lines of the Kiev tradition. On the one side he maintained the historical approach, and on the other side he was inclined towards the deductivist and mathematical approach. The paper thus questions the established view among the historians of Russian economic thought of Bilimovich as a consistent adherent of marginalism. His work bears also several features of historicism.

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.

From Jacob Viner (1927) to David A. Reisman (1998), Adam Smith's departures from an advocacy of laissez-faire in The Wealth of Nations have been interpreted by a number of scholars. In this paper, we examine one of the oddest, and perhaps least noticed, of those departures. That was Smith's defense of the civil law of lay patronage in the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which appears in his discussion of the social benefits and potential social costs of institutions for religious instruction. A lay patron was a non-cleric individual who held the right under civil law to select the minister of a local parish church. In Smith's time, roughly two-thirds of the lay patrons in Scotland were wealthy landowners and one-third were crown officials. In addition, municipal corporations (cities) and universities held some patronage rights.

The Malthusian population doctrine formed an integral part of both theory and policy in classical economics: “[T]he Malthusian theory lent support to the subsistence theory of wages and prepared the way for the Ricardian preoccupation with the land-using bias of economic progress; by explaining poverty in terms of a simple race between population and the means of subsistence, it provided the touchstone for all classical thinking about economic policy” (Blaug 1997, p. 65). Among historians of economic thought there is probably little in this statement with which to disagree. A variety of interpretations, however, have been given to the subsequent career of the population doctrine, including its place in the economics of Alfred Marshall. Economists after John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter argued, found the population doctrine to be of little theoretical use to economics: many leading economists of the neoclassical school, including Alfred Marshall, “paid their respects to it, even though they no longer based upon it any part of their analytic structures” (1954, p. 890). Mark Blaug, by contrast, suggests that the analysis of population in Marshall's Principles of Economics indicates an “orthodox classical attitude to population problems” (1997, p. 385). Yet another perspective is offered by John Whitaker who remarks that early in his career Marshall resolved to transform the “old political economy into a new science of economics, open to the progressive intellectual and social movements of the day.” His intent was to leave behind the sterile controversies and pessimistic pronouncements of the old political economy, including those associated with the population doctrine (1996, vol. 1, pp. xvii, xx).

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.