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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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.

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.

Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence—in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to the origins of that label and the avenues via which the notion of a “Chicago school” of economics came to be. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, drawing on both published and archival resources. What emerges is a story of a label of uncertain origin but wrapped up in competing agendas, the first stage in the history of which culminates in 1962 with its rejection by two of the very people who helped birth it.

This paper embeds the early political economy of Friedrich August von Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. The urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to stabilize the disintegrating societal orders is identified as a crucial driver behind the parallelisms between Hayek and the ordoliberals. Their shared theoretical position is that in such moments, liberty can thrive sustainably only after a framework of general and stable rules has been established. Hayek’s proximity to ordoliberalism was most explicitly discernible in The Road to Serfdom and at the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, culminating in the shared politico-economic vision of the competitive order. The contextual nature of Hayek’s ordoliberalism surfaced in the years after The Constitution of Liberty when his focus shifted, along with the postwar intellectual and institutional stabilization of the West: from how stable orders enable liberty, to how liberty enables the evolution of orders.

I defended my doctoral dissertation on stochastic stability of general equilibrium systems in Penn’s Applied Mathematics program in fall 1968. That year I began teaching math for economists, mathematical economics, microeconomics, and even econometrics at Rutgers College, where I remained for a couple of years before moving to Duke. At Rutgers I saw that graduate students took required courses in micro, macro, statistics, math, and econometrics, and there were electives in other fields like public finance and economic history. I didn’t know that there was any subdiscipline, or field, called the history of economic thought.

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.

In the eighteenth-century Scottish and British cultural context, idleness was a central issue for religion, literature, art, and philosophy. This paper analyzes the reflections of David Hume and Adam Smith on idleness and commercial society. Hume advanced his most provocative view on the subject in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), where idleness is represented as the endowment made by the “very sparing hand” of the “author of nature” to humanity. My argument is that Smith’s view on idleness that was advanced in the Wealth of Nations (1776) is connected to Hume’s Dialogues, as Smith’s invisible hand defeats idleness through a combination of self-interest, the propensity to exchange, and the division of labor. The broader aim of this study is to add to the philosophical relationship between the Scottish philosophers.