This paper considers the distinction made by David Ricardo between “permanent” and “temporary” causes, which he sometimes refers to also as “stable” and “accidental” causes (see The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo [hereinafter Works] I: 86, 88, 92; VI: 154), to derive implications useful to distinguish his approach from subsequent developments of the notions of short-period and long-period equilibrium. In particular, I trace the change of focus in the concept of “permanent” forces brought about by Alfred Marshall—from whose insights Alfred Kahn and John Maynard Keynes drew inspiration for their short-period analysis—which paved the way to fundamental changes in the method and theory.

It is argued that Ricardo’s distinction maintains an heuristic value, in particular vis-à-vis the distinction between short and long period, which is part of the common language in standard economics.

John Stuart Mill’s involvement with the Land Question in Ireland is analyzed from the viewpoint of his theory of institutions. I argue that, for Mill, institutions should promote progress without endangering social order. When referring to economic institutions, “progress” meant, essentially, human improvement, a rise in economic productivity, and the increase of social justice. According to Mill, the cottier system did not fulfill any of these requisites and should be abandoned. Mill also rejected transposing to Ireland the “English model” of capitalist agriculture. This institution could eventually solve the economic problem but involved the unjust eviction of tenants and would not regenerate the Irish character. Given the particularities of Ireland, Mill endorsed peasant property as the most suitable form of land appropriation. It would, at the same time, improve the character of the people, enhance productivity, and increase the social justice of the system. It would also mitigate the conflicts that jeopardized social order.

The ancient Greeks were admired for many things, but particularly for their lack of the corrosive, self-centered complex that leads many authors today to believe that everything started with, and everything originated in, Greece. The ancient Greeks were self-confident enough to accept that they had been influenced by and had absorbed many foreign elements, which their talent then transformed into a new expression of civilization. At a somewhat less mundane level, many ideas that have shaped our thoughts and continue to influence our thinking today, across the world, originated in the past. They were also debated from different points of view in Athens and in other areas in Greece.

This article intends to assess and compare the main contributions to our discipline of two major authors and authorities. Both of them originated in Central Europe and, later on, went to work in the United States, where their most important books on the subject were published posthumously during the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, besides pertaining to different generations, they also were very unlike from each other.

The eldest, Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), remains much better known among contemporary economists, although very few of them seem to have read in its entirety his imposing History of Economic Analysis (1954a), still a model of our trade. The same probably also applies to his shorter and previous book on the same subject, Economic Doctrine and Method, which had been initially published in Germany forty years earlier, as well as to the essays collected in his Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes.

Most Adam Smith scholars hold that Smith endorsed public provision of education to offset deleterious consequences arising from the division of labor. Smith’s putative endorsement of publicly funded education is taken by some scholars as evidence that he tends more toward progressive than classical liberalism, or that this is a departure from, perhaps an inconsistency with, Smith’s otherwise strong presumption against government intervention in markets. This paper argues that these interpretations are flawed because Smith ultimately does not advocate public provision of education. He raises the idea and explores its potential benefits, but he ultimately does not endorse it. Smith also provides reason to be skeptical of public provision of education, which suggests that his final position may have inclined against it.

What explains the ambition to get rich? Adam Smith is clear that commercial ambition, the passionate desire for great wealth, is not simply a desire to satisfy one’s material needs. His argument on what underlies it, however, is not obvious. I review three possibilities suggested by Smith’s work and the scholarly literature—vanity, the love of system, and the desire for tranquility—and conclude that none of them captures the underlying motive of commercial ambition. Instead, I argue that Smith understands commercial ambition as a misguided desire for excellence. Ambitious pursuers of wealth are driven by the desire to deserve and to enjoy recognition for their excellence, but their judgment of what is truly excellent is corrupted by the standards of a wealth-worshipping society. Instead of appealing to the moral standpoint of the impartial spectator, they construct in their minds and follow a corruptive moral guide: the wealth-worshipping spectator.

Although Jacques Rueff (1896–1978) is known as a liberal thinker, what he means by the term “economic liberalism” should be specified. Indeed, for Rueff, the notion of economic liberalism leads to the notion of the liberal social order: i.e., a situation where the freedom of the individual is maintained and State intervention is justified in order to ensure a harmony of interests. This paper aims to bring out the particularism of the Rueffian liberal social order and to explore the connections between Rueff’s vision of this concept and his specific approach to liberalism, where private property (the pillar of freedom in liberal thinking) may be called into question under certain circumstances.

This paper deals with a debate among Ralph George Hawtrey, John Richard Hicks, and John Maynard Keynes concerning the capacity of the central bank to influence the short-term and the long-term rates of interest. Both Hawtrey and Keynes considered the central bank’s ability to influence short-term rates of interest. However, they do not put the same emphasis on the study of the long-term rates of interest. According to Keynes, long-term rates are influenced by future expected short-term rates (1930, 1936), whereas for Hawtrey ([1932] 1962, 1937, 1938), long-term rates are more dependent on the business cycle. Short-term rates do not have much effect on long-term rates, according to Hawtrey. In 1939, Hicks enters the controversy, giving credit to both Hawtrey’s and Keynes’s theories, and also introducing limits to the operations of arbitrage. He thus presented a nuanced view.

I do not think that it would serve much of a purpose to answer Hollander and Peart (1999) point by point, to repeat old arguments, and to once again cite long quotations from Mill. Furthermore, I doubt that the Editor of this Journal would give me the space and time to do so. Instead I propose to ask a number of basic questions about Mill's methodology, give my answers to them and show why I find fault with what I take to be Hollander and Peart's answers. I doubt that this will convince my adversaries. But I hope to show our readers what the major issues are in the disagreement and, perhaps, even to get Hollander and Peart to agree that these are the issues that separate us. If I fail in this latter task they will have the opportunity to point this out in their Rejoinder.

The British public debt grew to unprecedented levels during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, and the debt service burden, aggravated by deflation, was reaching alarming heights in the postwar period, absorbing over half of all tax revenue. David Ricardo was prompted by economic analysis and existing circumstances to advocate the rapid redemption of existing public debt by means of a “capital levy,” a one-time tax on the nation's property. In print, he advocated the proposal in “The Funding System,” an entry in a supplementary volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1820, in which he wrote that “by one great effort, we should get rid of one of the most terrible scourges which was ever invented to afflict a nation” (Ricardo 1951–73, IV, p. 197).

Sir William Petty (1623–1687) is generally known to historians of economic thought as an early contributor to classical political economy. In fact, Karl Marx claimed—rightly, I believe—that Petty was the founder of that school of thought (Marx 1867, p. 81). Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos echo the sentiment that Petty, and not Adam Smith, was “the founder of classical political economy, that school which had its culmination in the Ricardian economic theory” (Amati and Aspromourgos 1985, p. 127). Aspromourgos has also observed that Petty wrote A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, as well as other works, in order to provide “an answer to the questions of how to maximize total employment and surplus labour, and how to best utilize surplus labour” (Aspromourgos 1996, p. 16, emphasis added).

James Maitland, Lord Lauderdale published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase (1804) only twentyeight years after the publication of the “Inquiry”: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. A comparison of the titles strongly suggests some relationship, and indeed even glancing through the first few pages of Lauderdale's book confirms this conjecture. The book takes off as a critique of Smith's, and by-and-large remains so till the end. Many of the elements of his criticism can be seen in the difference in the wording of the titles of the two books. Except for “Nations” all the significant words in Smith's title are included in Lauderdale's, but he adds three more: “Origin,” “Means” and “Public” (which is not a substitute for the omitted “Nation”). As we shall see, in his view, ignoring these led to major deficiencies in Smith's work, and Lauderdale set out to point them out, and if possible, to correct them.

The last decade has seen an outburst of growth models designed to replace the conventional Solow growth model, with its exogenous trend of technical progress, by more realistic models that generate increasing returns (to labor, capital and/or scale) as a result of endogenous technical progress. In contrast to the Solow model, the new models suggest that policy interventions can affect the long-run rate of economic growth. Nicholas Kaldor's growth model, designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to replace the Solow growth model, is a precursor of the new growth models.

In 1954 the American Economic Association held its first session on “The International Flow of Economic Ideas.” As a discussant, the great scholar of Walras, William Jafft said, “The Iron and Bamboo Curtains of today were preceded three-quarters of a century ago by nationalistic, linguistic, and other curtains–all impending the free flow of ideas in the learned world,” (1955, 38–9). A.W. Coats later added some other obstacles, “…the unavailability of modern information retrieval methods, or perhaps a plain ornery human unwillingness to cooperate or personal dislike, all have at times been impediments to the progress of knowledge,” (1987, 66).

In a recent article Luca Fiorito and Cosma Orsi accused John R. Commons of anti-Semitism “within a broad and xenophobic framework.” They rested their indictment on three sources: an interview in which Mark Perlman spoke of his father, Selig; Commons’s report on immigration for the United States Industrial Commission; and Commons’s book Races and Immigrants. This comment, looking at the same sources, finds confusion about the meanings of anti-Semitism and xenophobia as they are applied to Commons.

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.