In his autobiographical piece, “A Jevonian Seditionist,” Sidney Weintraub ([1983]1989, p. 50) recalled that in 1957 he sent an offprint of his paper on the micro-foundations of aggregate supply to D. H. Robertson. He remembered that “Robertson generously wrote me that it was ‘lucid and definitive,’ and that thenceforth he would not return to the subject again. I confess that I have lost or misplaced his letter, along with the one by [Alan] Sproul, in my move to Canada, though they were prized possessions.” And I have my own memory of a conversation with Sidney in which he told me that Robertson had written in that letter “If this is not what Keynes meant, it is what he should have meant.”

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) was founded in 1920 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the leading economic research organizations in the world. The NBER still exists today and still enjoys a high reputation, but the NBER of today bears little resemblance to the organization it once was. Between 1920 and the present the NBER has undergone a number of significant changes in form, function, and direction, and this history is one that includes moments of considerable drama. There were times of great financial stress, to the point where the future existence of the organization was in doubt, times when the organization seemed to be able to maintain a highly favored financial status despite outside criticism, and times of sharp conflict between the Bureau and its financial patrons.

The manuscript collection of the National Library of Scotland contains two undergraduate essays in “political economy” written for the Rev. Thomas Chalmers while he was Professor of Moral Philosophy at St Andrews University from 1823 to 1828. The first is signed “Pat. J. Stirling.” The second is unsigned, but is in the same hand. The Library attributes both manuscripts to Patrick James Stirling (1809–1891). The essays are marked with deletions and insertions, most of which appear to be by Stirling himself, and the summary appraisal at the end of each in Chalmers's own hand is signed “Thomas Chalmers.” In the transcription of the shorter essay printed in section VI below, [bracketed] words are those which have been deleted. Underlined words are those inserted by Stirling or possibly Chalmers. Stirling's erratic capitalization and hyphenation, and the indentation of his first paragraph, have been preserved.

Scholarly discussions of the eighteenth-century luxury controversy invariably acknowledge the important role of David Hume, usually identifying him as one of the first to have made a strong case against the traditional view that luxury is morally corrupt and inimical to the survival of the state. But, having said this, they tend to treat Hume rather summarily, often focusing exclusively on the 1752 essay “Of Refinement in the Arts” and generally agreeing with one leading commentator that “Hume's arguments are straightforward, and can be dealt with briefly.” On closer examination, however, it appears that Hume's treatment of luxury was more complex in its historical development, and more subtle in its final form, than some have supposed. The first part of the following discussion considers the historical progression of Hume's thinking while the second consists in an analysis of “Refinement,” with particular attention to an important but overlooked distinction between the appropriate moral and political responses to luxury.

In the late nineteenth century, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's magisterial work (1881) or capital and interest provided the foundation upon which virtually all modern theories are built. In his first volume, History and Critique of Interest Theories, Böhm-Bawerk classified and (in his mind) refuted all previous explanations. Böhm-Bawerk thought a proper theory of interest must explain the apparent undervaluation of future goods For example, if a machine is expected to yield annual rents of $1,000 for ten years why does it sell now for less than $10,000? To answer this question was to provide a theory of interest, for only with such an undervaluation would it be possible for a capitalist to invest in machines, for example, and reap a flow of returns, over time greater than his initial investment.

In a recent paper, R. Ekelund and D. Walker (1996) argue that, “[i]ncentives, utilitarian principles, and the diffusion of property rights are the key to understanding Mill on the statics and dynamics of ‘equity and justice’”(p. 576). Their paper, which deals with John Stuart Mill's views on taxation, reads very much like a modern defense of popular capitalism. From the static point of view, it is imperative not to interfere with the internal relationship between economic variables and thus, distort incentives (proportional income tax). From the dynamic point of view, “inheritance taxes [are] the essential mechanism of an evolutionary change towards an efficiently functioning capitalism” (p. 578, italics added).

The corpus of Jewish legal writings contains many discussions of economic issues and ideas. Yet, aside from a small group of scholars, historians of economics have tended to ignore the texts of Jewish law. As Ephraim Kleiman (1997) points out, the sheer size and inaccessibility of the Jewish law corpus presents a major barrier. Economic ideas are scattered across a vast amount of material. The canonical text of Jewish law is the Talmud, which spans 2,700 folio pages and two million words. Hundreds of commentaries have been written on the Talmud (or parts of it). There are three major codes of Jewish Law (based on the Talmud and selected commentaries), plus commentaries on the codes and lesser known codes (based on the major codes). About one million responsa (questions and answers in Jewish law) are known to exist; these are collected in hundreds of books. Today, new commentaries and responsa appear each year, in addition to multiple rabbinic journals. In order to understand these materials, the scholar must be well versed in Hebrew, Aramaic, and the reading of the Talmud.

During a crucial period of United States history, 1880s–1940s, ideas developed in political economy were the core component of a transformation in the way Americans thought about the social and political order. These decades, the era of the elaboration in the United States and internationally of what historians of liberal reform thought refer to as the New Liberalism, were the site of a general reassessment of the constitutive ideologies, Smithian/Lockean liberalism, and a democratized, commercialized version of classical republicanism hanging over from the agrarian republic. Scary, unexpectedly turbulent conditions in an economy plagued by recurrent cyclical downturns in investment and employment, accompanied by unprecedented levels of social conflict, placed a premium on new knowledge. This need arose just as the academic professionalization of the social sciences, the rise of critical political journalism, and highly mobilized women's and labor movements began providing impressive new analytical talent. Efforts to find answers to pressing issues raised by the “social question” were intended initially by most of those involved as a salvage operation for what remained valid among key tenets of American liberalism regarding individualism, competition, the efficacy of the market, and the role of the state. Instead, they led ultimately to a reconstruction in public philosophy, at least on the scale of the one underway since the 1970s, with the “the return of the market,” the unprecedented sway of neoclassicism, and the multidisciplinary appeal of rational choice theory.

In December 1913, William Ernest Johnson (1858–1931), a Cambridge logician, published a famous article on demand theory in the Economic Journal (EJ) entitled “The Pure Theory of Utility Curves.” Although Johnson's treatment of the subject was in some ways original, in others it strongly resembled the analysis set forth by Vilfredo Pareto in earlier contributions, particularly in the Manuel d'économie politique (Italian edition 1906, French edition 1909). Despite this resemblance, Johnson did not cite Pareto. This failure to acknowledge Pareto's precedence aroused resentment and some suspicion of plagiarism among the Italian Paretians. In the end, however, the Paretian economists of the period generally assumed that Johnson was unfamiliar with Pareto's works and had obtained his results independently. For example, in 1916, Luigi Amoroso published a review of Johnson's 1913 paper in the Giornale degli Economisti, in which he wrote, “From Johnson's article it comes out that Johnson does not know Pareto's work” (Amoroso 1916, p. 410, author's translation). Amoroso attributed Johnson's ignorance of Pareto's work to a more general ignorance on the part of English economists, “Johnson's lacuna, more than particular to him, is a lacuna of the area in which he lives” (Amoroso 1916, p. 410, author's translation).

The 150th celebration of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was a major stimulus for new publications on the issue of free trade versus protection, a question that dominated economic policy agendas all over Europe in the nineteenth century. Original texts dating from that period were again made public (Kadish 1996, Schonhardt-Bailey 1997), the works of Richard Cobden became available (Cain 1995), and Douglas A. Irwin's book (1996) and Anthony Howe's treatise (1997) can be seen as the “cosmopolitan” answers to older (Semmel 1970) and contemporary (Magnusson 1994 and Wendler 1996) defenses of a “national” economic policy. This literature, however, as well as conferences on the reception of free trade (Marrison 1998), concentrated on the commercial policy of the most economically advanced nations, leaving completely out of scope discussions, debates and economic policy dilemmas related to international trade in other, less-developed countries.

Most historians know Robert Lowe (1811–1892) as W. E. Gladstone's first Chancellor (1868–73) and the leading orator against the Reform Bill of 1867. Educationists to this day criticize or praise his Revised Code of 1862, which introduced payment by results in schools. Historians of economic thought add Lowe's critique of relativism (evinced by his views on Ireland) and his stridently classical statements of the role of political economy from his later dispute with the English historical school.

Juan Noyola is widely credited as an originator of the Latin American “structuralist” theory of inflation. His key contribution is a 1956 article comparing inflation in Mexico and Chile. However there is disagreement about the nature of this contribution, or even what “structuralist” means in this context. I argue that Noyola's innovation was grounding money and credit in a highly institutional political economy of class conflict. This grounding endogenized not only money, but also policymaking and the State.

The early literature on ordinalism and Vilfredo Pareto's incomplete development of ordinal theory, by John R. Hicks and R. G. D. Allen (1934), Oskar Lange (1934), Hicks (1939), George Stigler (1950), Paul A. Samuelson (1974) and others, referred exclusively to Pareto's more mature French language works: the Manuel d'Économie Politique (1909) or the subsequent encyclopaedia entry entitled “Économie Mathématique” (1911). The related discussion considered whether Pareto was an inconsistent ordinalist, a cardinalist, or confused.

Today we tend to read David Hume's Essays, Moral, Political and Literary in the 1777 edition, a two-part collection dating essentially from the early 1740s and then again from the early 1750s, as revised continually by the author until his death in the year of the American Declaration of Independence. Although this is better than reading the essays in anthologies, even the best text that we have ever had (the Liberty Fund's) is a compendious final version rather than a critical edition, one that would lead us not only into what the essays are but also what they were about. Hume's revisions and afterthoughts are, for the most part, duly noted, but never put into perspective; and his intentions at the outset are underplayed or simply ignored (Hume 1777). Yet it would be a great help to have more clarity on this desire for changes, for it is remarkable in Hume's career. When, very shortly after publication in 1738, he came to feel reservations about the Treatise of Human Nature, he simply scrapped it and wrote new versions of his philosophy. With the Essays, in contrast, he was more tempted than with any other work published in his lifetime, and more chronically tempted, to revise and adapt his thoughts and then resubmit them to the public. With these labors he was not saving or preparing them for posterity so much as constantly adjusting them to the present as he understood it. This is the kind of evidence that might be cited for a recent claim that the Essays are “contemporary history” (Pocock 1999, vol. ii., p.177ff.).

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.

E. E. Slutsky, the originator of the eponymous equation and part-inventor of the Slutsky-Yule effect, is perhaps the Soviet/Russian/Ukrainian economist most quoted by mainstream economists today, although his fame in the West rests on only two of his articles that have been translated into English. These are the 1915 article on the theory of consumer budgets, and the 1927 article on the random causes of business cycles. Many more papers remain available only in their original Russian versions, although a few were published first in other languages such as German. Presented here is a modest effort to bring more of Slutsky's work to an English-speaking audience. In a chronological bibliography of Slutsky's writings published in 1960, sandwiched between items four and six—“On the Criterion of Goodness of Fit of the Regression Lines” (1914) and “On the Theory of the Budget of the Consumer” (1915)—sits an item originally published in 1914, an “Essay on the Economic Views of William Petty.” This item is translated below.

This essay was originally read at the conference of the Society of Economists at the Kiev Institute of Commerce on November 14, 1913, to mark the 250th anniversary (in 1912) of the appearance of William Petty's first economic treatise. It was subsequently published in the Student Bulletin of the same institute (1914, Numbers 16, 17, 18).

Publishing this essay in the form of a separate pamphlet I, of course, acknowledge its extreme incompleteness in many respects, but think that the extreme poverty of Russian literature about such a wonderful economist justifies its worth.

The dismissal of academicians from German universities under the Restoration of Civil Service Act (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums), promulgated by the National Socialists on April 7, 1933, and the expulsion of academicians from Germany, Austria, and other European countries interrupted or destroyed promising developments in economics, as well as in physics or other areas. According to this new “law,” which was passed by the Nazis in a short cut immediately after coming to power, “disagreeable” persons could be dislocated from the public service predominantly for racist (section 3) or political (section 4) reasons.