This paper re-examines Dennis Robertson’s ‘real’ business cycle (RBC) theory outlined in his 1915 A Study in Industrial Fluctuation. Even if, for Robertson, cycles find their origin and respond to oscillations in entrepreneurs’ “rational inducement” to invest, in opposition to RBC models in which every outcome is by construction an equilibrium outcome, Robertson discusses in a traditional way the short-run consequences of such exogenous technological shocks. There are no intertemporal equilibrium phenomena in the sense of the RBC approach; cycle theory is organized, for Robertson, around a Marshallian-defined center of gravity (or long-run equilibrium state of rest). For him, the real forces are represented by the gestation period of investment, but also by investment’s durability, its imperfect divisibility, and, allied with these, its intractability. These features of investment lead to excessive outlays upon capital investment, which ultimately depresses their marginal productivity. The inevitable and rational result is a downturn in the capital goods industries and the onset of a cycle.

In my note on dissent (2004), I emphasized that heterodoxy and dissent had to be defined socially. Given that crucial elements of the social context differ from one society to another, it follows that the meaning and significance of dissent may vary too. Barnett (2006) has pointed out a conclusion I should have drawn explicitly: that my suggestions for thinking about dissent make sense only in Western economics. In the former Soviet Union, as he points out, dissent in economics could not be understood apart from the political situation. The examples he cites illustrate some of the ways in which dissent in Soviet economics differed from that in the West, where there was no officially sanctioned orthodoxy comparable to Marxism-Leninism (or rather to what the Soviet authorities chose to call by that name) from which economists wished either safely to signal their dissent or to which they wished, despite their dissent, to be seen to adhere. We see here, it might be argued, a simple difference between two types of society.

John Bates Clark (1847–1938) holds a secure position in the history of American economic thought. Specifically, he is remembered for developing the marginal product theory of distribution, which was presented in its most complete form in The Distribution of Wealth (1899). However, Clark's primary intellectual commitment has been largely overlooked. This was his search for the rules and institutions that would create a prosperous economy featuring a just distribution while maintaining the essential structures of competitive capitalism.

According to Alfred Marshall, the element of time is the most important and difficult aspect to deal with in the economic analysis. Accordingly, he has placed the concept of time at the core of his economic reasoning, and he has developed a number of analytical tools that allow including time in his analytical framework: most notably, the cœteris paribus pound, the representative firm, and the distinction between short and long periods. However, he encountered an insurmountable impasse when dealing with the real elapsing of time in his static framework: the solution proposed in his Principles of Economics remained, for him, highly unsatisfactory, problematic, and incomplete. The real elapsing of time—unavoidable in his reflections—copes very badly indeed with his analytical construction based on equilibrium. The continuity of time is the element of the Marshallian analysis most quickly criticized and rejected. After him, in the economic analysis, time gradation was rigorously divided into “short” and “long” periods, whereas Marshall’s concerns for the continuity of real time were banished from what was considered a “rigorous” analysis. The main aims of this paper are to frame Marshall’s distinction between short and long periods and to underline those aspects of his contribution that were lost or were substantially simplified in later literature.

The article contrasts an intellectual history perspective on the transition from classical to neo-classical economics with doctrinal accounts of the marginal revolution. Marshall’s opinions on the mixture of theoretical, methodological, and moral and political elements involved in the generational divide shows that more was at stake than accounts in which theory alone is stressed suggest. It is also argued that in other respects less was at stake: drawing a sharp dividing line between pre- and post-marginal treatments of policy issues does not do justice to underlying continuities in the empirical utilitarian tradition. The article is dedicated to the memory of R. D. C. (Bob) Black, whose work on Jevons illustrates the benefits of an intellectual historian’s approach to this significant transition in economic thinking.

The core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy—equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual—have long been defined almost exclusively by the Bank War, which commenced in earnest with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Yet, this same rhetoric proved far more pervasive and consistent when one considers the ardent opposition to the protective system. Opponents of the protective tariff, commencing with the Tariff of 1816 and continuing unabated to the Walker Tariff of 1846, thus contributed directly to the development of Jacksonian Democracy, and, by introducing and continually employing this language, gave to the tariff debates in the United States a unique angle that differed from the debates in Europe.

The aim of this essay is to assess James Medbery MacKaye’s contribution to socialist thought during the Progressive Era. Largely forgotten today, MacKaye proposed a special version of socialism, which he called “Pantocracy,” based on a peculiar blend of utilitarian and eugenic assumptions. Specifically, MacKaye held that biological fitness mapped to the capacity for happiness—biologically superior individuals possess a greater capacity for happiness—and saw the eugenic breeding of “a being or race of beings capable in the first place of happiness” as a possibility open by the advent of Pantocracy. Incidentally, this essay provides further evidence that the influence of eugenic and racialist beliefs upon the American Progressive Era political economy was so deep-rooted and pervasive that it did cut across traditional ideological boundaries.

Knut Wicksell’s formulation of monetary economics as the study of the relation between aggregate supply and aggregate demand played an important role in the development of macroeconomics. Wicksell’s contributions are better understood if we consider the Walrasian roots of his approach. Wicksell pointed to two shortcomings of Léon Walras’s theory: incomplete treatment of the demand for money, and lack of a concept of capital stressing the time element. Wicksell was influenced by Walras’s notions of the tâtonnement by which markets solve the equations and of the zero-profit entrepreneur. Nevertheless, Wicksell’s interpretation of the dynamics of the credit market, with a price (interest rate) distinct from its equilibrium (“natural”) level and the implicit recognition that the latter could assume negative values, did not fit into the Walrasian tâtonnement mold. As the first to produce textbooks on both theories of value and money, Wicksell was confronted with the problem of how to establish connections between them.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.”

WN I.ii.2

Keynes abandoned the theoretical approach used in the Treatise on Money, the fundamental equations approach, very soon after publishing the Treatise. One reason why he may have done so is discussed in this paper. Twice in 1931 someone pointed out to Keynes a third fundamental equation, one for the price of investment goods, an equation Keynes had not developed in the Treatise. This third fundamental equation may have shown Keynes that his fundamental equation approach may not be promising or fruitful.

Wild price swings following World War I motivated some economists and their allies to start a stable money campaign. John R. Commons joined this campaign, and the story of his participation opens a window into an historical learning episode in which the campaign, though it failed, sparked intellectual efforts and interacted with events in ways that changed beliefs about relations between central bank actions, on the one hand, and unemployment, inflation, and economic growth, on the other. The paper dwells on Commons’ role and on the long learning experience that led participants to conclusions they could not have anticipated when they embarked on their campaign.

This paper provides a refutation of the “absolute immizeration” doctrine that S. Hollander attributes to Marx, by emphasizing the Marxian original categories and laws of capitalist production in order to base Marx’s opposition to this doctrine on his more profound opposition to Classics about the law of supply and demand for labor.

The paper proceeds as follows: first, it is shown that the Marxian subsistence wage does not exclude population growth. Second, the analysis of surplus population will reveal how it is not only a condition of the business cycle, but also one of its immediate results. In this sense, the so-called theory of dual labor force, which Hollander uses to discard the role of surplus population in the decreasing real-wage trend, proves a misunderstanding of the origin and nature of the industrial reserve army.

From the labor demand side, on the other hand, the endogeneity of technical progress precludes any “ongoing process” of increasing organic composition of capital. Finally, it will appear that categories of labor power, wages defined as the value of labor power, or laws such as decreasing necessary labor and increasing surplus labor, allow Marx to develop a law of supply and demand for labor partly unrelated to the number of workers and the evolution of population growth, which necessarily rules out any birth-rate control policy.