The works of Adam Smith are filled with quotable moments. The pin factory. The poor man’s son. The invisible hand. The butcher, the brewer, and the baker. The dog and the philosopher. The impartial spectator. The man of system and his chessboard. And our propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. All of these are so well known and so often quoted that I’ve had editors ask me just to refer to them in passing rather than quoting them in full.

The word VALUE, it is to be observed, has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called ‘value in use;’ the other, ‘value in exchange.’ The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce any thing; scarce any thing can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it (Smith 1776, I, iv, p. 42).

This paper examines Marx’s views on capitalist globalization and its supposed inevitability, and contends that they underwent a substantial evolution and revision after the publication of the Communist Manifesto. In the case of China, a prime example of the Asiatic mode of production, Marx even doubted whether globalization (capitalism) would ever be able to accomplish its historical mission of developing the forces of production and creating the material conditions for a higher mode of production, viz., communism. In the Russian case, he seriously entertained the notion that it could bypass the hardships and vicissitudes of capitalism and forge its own unique path to socialism. If accepted, this interpretation represents a serious challenge to the universality and validity of Marx’s materialist conception of history.

The aim of this article is to make an overall assessment of Andreas George Papandreou’s theoretical contributions during his American academic career, from the perspective of the history of economic thought. Papandreou contributed to the postwar development of economic thought in competition theory and experimental testing of consumer theory. In developing competition theory, he introduced a new method of evaluating the monopolistic power of a firm through a coefficient measuring the firm’s penetration in the market. Furthermore, he suggested a way of experimentally testing whether individual preferences satisfy the axiom of transitivity. He actively participated in the methodological controversies on the realisticness of economic assumptions that took place between 1946 and 1953, and on the empirical meaning of economics in 1963, between Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Fritz Machlup, Herbert Simon, and others.

The Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm was the core framework of industrial organization for two decades, and had a significant impact on competition policy from the 1950s through the 1970s. This essay considers what made the SCP framework so influential in the United States, the shortcomings economists identified in the framework during the shift to the “new IO” in the late 1970s, and the lasting contributions that the SCP paradigm made on policy and the study of industry and competition.

This paper aims at understanding social practices and institutions that ensured the transnational diffusion, recognition, and renewal of the research program in the General Equilibrium Theory (GET), in spite of multiple critics and apparent theoretical dead ends. First, we trace the main conceptual developments of the Walrasian GET program since the 1950s and thus elaborate on its intellectual identity. Then, based on a systematic study of the educational and professional trajectories typical for several generations of GET scholars, we analyze a social form taken by this transnational and multidisciplinary “scientific community”: an institutional dynamics of the Walrasian GET program, most common career patterns, and the forms of international and intergenerational transmission. We construct a database of GET theorists and apply to this dataset a technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in order to investigate the relational patterns between attribution of scientific credit (symbolic capital) and biographical properties in a transnational space of the GET scholars.

Aaron Director taught at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1934 and from 1946 to 1965. Both periods corresponded to crucial stages in the development of Chicago monetary economics under the leaderships of Henry Simons and Milton Friedman, respectively. Any impact that Director may have had in the development of those stages and on the relationship between the views of Simons and Friedman has been frustrated by Director’s lack of publications. I provide evidence, much of it for the first time, showing the important role played by Director in the development of Chicago monetary economics, including his role as a transmitter of Simons’s ideas to Friedman.

I attended the now famous conferences at Sussex in 1968 and Nottingham in 1969 that preceded the later founding of both the History of Economic Thought Society in the UK and the History of Economics Society (HES) in North America. In 1969, I also helped to found the UK Money Study Group at its first conference in Hove, while in 1970 I was at Karl Brunner’s first Konstanz Seminar. In both fields, these conferences were followed by many, many more. At that time new specialist journals were also appearing. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (JMCB), where I had a paper in the second issue, started life in 1969. So did History of Political Economy (HOPE), but there I had nothing to submit. Ironically, given Lionel Robbins’s still notorious attack on this proposed journal at Sussex, to which I shall return below, my first completed research paper in history of economic thought (HET)—on Thomas Tooke (Laidler 1972)—was already committed to his forthcoming Festschrift.

American dominance of the discipline of economics in the present century is beyond dispute. In terms of Nobel prizes and the creative ideas that spawned them, academic economists working in the United States have an incomparable record. As all who study the history of economic thought know, this was not always the case. Indeed, most histories of thought, when dealing with the nineteenth century, leave the impression that little of merit was done outside the British Isles. But Alfred Marshall's Principles was not the only “basic book” of merit to be published at the crest of nineteenth-century neoclassicism. It was possibly not even the most prescient work.

Debate over the interpretation of David Ricardo's economics has assumed special relevance since the publication of Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Sraffa sought to revive and reconstruct a nearly lost classical tradition whose main elements, he believed, had been given their first coherent expression by Ricardo (Sraffa 1951, Garegnani 1984). On this interpretation, Ricardo's analysis, far from being a fumbling step toward the modern theory of supply and demand, as Marshall (1920) would have it, or a misguided detour as Jevons believed (1879), instead constitutes a logically consistent alternative to the marginalist theory that emerged after 1870.

The following short, but densely packed paper by Professor Shohken Mawatari is the first in a series to be published at irregular intervals in the H.E.S. Bulletin. And if this inaugural contribution is anything to go by, the result will be a substantial and valuable addition to our knowledge of the contemporary state of economics in a variety of countries. Moreover, it may be especially enlightening for American and British readers, who all too often take it for granted that the economic ideas and practices prevailing in their own countries constitute the norm, if not the ideal to which professional economists elsewhere should aspire.

William Petty (1623–87)—medical doctor, Oxford professor of anatomy, Gresham College professor, surveyor of Ireland for the Cromwellian Protectorate, Fellow of the College of Physicians, founding member of The Royal Society, and inventor of political arithmetic—is now most particularly remembered for his contributions to the formation of political economy. When Petty left Ireland for the last time in 1685 and returned to London, he took with him a very large collection of unpublished papers and correspondence. These largely remained in the property of his descendants—together with some important later additions—until 1993, when they were sold to The British Library. Petty's collected, published economic writings were edited and republished a century ago, together with some other materials (Hull 1899). In the 1920s Petty's descendant, the sixth Marquis of Lansdowne (H.E.W. Petty-Fitzmaurice), published two collections of manuscripts from what by then had become known as “The Petty Papers” archive (Lansdowne 1927, 1928). All these volumes have subsequently been republished in facsimile a number of times.