Liberal economists’ attitudes towards the welfare state are examined to see how clearly neoliberalism can be distinguished from other forms of liberalism. Three questions are asked. First, how could Friedrich Hayek believe he could accommodate elements of the welfare state agenda set by William Beveridge and John Maynard Keynes into his thinking? Second, why did Hayek become increasingly critical of the welfare state? Third, how far did Lionel Robbins, John Jewkes, and Alan Peacock agree with him? All three might be regarded as neoliberals according to the litmus test set by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe: that is, membership of the Mont Pèlerin Society or a think tank associated with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Yet, Robbins, Jewkes, and Peacock are on a spectrum between Mirowski’s definition of neoliberalism as a belief that freedom is to be found in the unfettered market, and classical and democratic liberals’ belief that people have to be nurtured to become effective citizens and have to be protected from the market’s disruptive effects. It is suggested that a nuanced approach is required in explaining why liberal economists came to believe the welfare state should make more use of markets and pricing systems for registering preferences and apportioning resources.

In the Bretton Woods era the controversy over cross-border use of national monies turned on how to create ‘symmetries’ and avoid significant ‘asymmetries’ in the way national currencies shared specific international currency functions. We examine the twentieth-century work of prominent economists on the nature, choice, and functions of international currencies. Prescriptive approaches to international currency formation are considered, beginning with the discussion of the Bretton Woods plans, followed by doctrinal developments stimulated by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. Why are those developments instructive, given recent revisitation of the currency internationalization question in modern international monetary thought and policy? The modern revival of this question resembles a rehabilitation and restatement of earlier controversies, though it underestimates the gradual encroachment of the idea of international currency competition. This idea came to dominate other doctrines from the 1970s; it accommodates the ongoing adaptation of national currencies to the full range of international currency functions.

The aim of this article is to describe the rise and fall of the workhouse system in connection with the developments that took place in economic thought in the transition from mercantilism to the Classical tradition. By examining the economic debate about wages, efficiency, labor market, workers’ mobility, and unemployment, we discuss whether the social policy shift epitomized by institutional reforms like the Gilbert Act (1782), the Rose Act (1793), and the Speenhamland system (1795) was accompanied and eventually inspired by a change in the perception of major political economy issues. In doing so, we review the writings of Jacob Vanderlint (d. 1740), George Berkeley (1685–1753), Malachy Postlethwayt (1707?–1767), Josiah Tucker (1713–1799), David Hume (1711–1776), and Adam Smith (1723-1790), among others. Although a direct influence by these writers cannot be proven, the originality of the present work rests on the effort to put into perspective the arguments elaborated by economic thinkers and the proposals made by social reformers so as to identify possible connections between economic theorizing and social legislation.

This paper reconstructs an important and little-known part of the activity of Richard Kahn in the 1950s, both as researcher and as policy advisor, which centered on the drafting of a book for the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations). Never actually published by the FAO for reasons clarified in this paper, the book dealt with fluctuations in the prices of primary products and how best to curb them. Offering a novel development of an idea first proposed by John Maynard Keynes, Kahn advocates the creation of buffer stocks managed by a supranational authority endowed with ample discretionary powers. The paper presents a complete reconstruction of Kahn’s views on the advantages of buffer stocks as an instrument to stabilize commodity prices, of the context in which these views took shape, and of the way they tied in with other parts of his economic theory and were reflected in his assessment of the commodity international agreements of the time to limit fluctuations in the prices of primary products. It thus fills a significant gap in our knowledge of one of the great economists of the twentieth century.

It is noted that Harry G. Johnson was widely admired for his broad knowledge of economics, and particularly for the excellence and synthesizing quality of much of his writing. His discussions of the Phillips curve and related matters are considered. It is found that they are brief, inaccurate, and inconsistent. It is clear that, despite his reputation, they should not be treated as authoritative. It is further suggested that rather than supposing that Johnson’s knowledge and capabilities have been grossly exaggerated, it may be better to conclude that the Phillips curve was not nearly so important in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s as has been supposed.

Our paper analyzes and compares two attempts at integrating unemployment in macroeconomics. The first, due to Peter Diamond, consists in a search model exhibiting multiple equilibria and wherein cycles may be produced. The second is due to David Andolfatto and Monika Merz, who, more or less simultaneously, constructed models enabling the integration of the matching function into RBC modeling. In the first sections, we present the methodology upon which our paper is based—Axel Leijonhufvud’s decision-tree insight—and briefly describe these three economists’ motivations and the context in which they were working. We continue with recounting the birth and further development of the search paradigm upon which Diamond’s, Andolfatto’s, and Merz’s attempts were based. These preliminaries settled, we address the heart of the paper, the critical analysis of their respective contributions. Our interest lies specifically in how they made their way in the development of the field. We explain why Diamond’s model, which ambitioned to rival Robert Lucas’s explanation of business fluctuations, did not live up to its author’s expectations. Andolfatto’s and Merz’s project was less ambitious, yet their model became an established component of the RBC program—but at the price of abandoning several constitutive traits of the search approach.

The issue of performativity concerns the claim that economics shape rather than merely describe the social world. This idea took hold following a paper by Donald MacKenzie and Yuval Millo entitled “Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange” (2003). That paper constitutes an important contribution to the history of economic thought, since it provides an original way to focus on the scientific construction of the real economy. The authors discuss the empirical success of the Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) model on the Chicago Board Options Exchange during the period from 1973 to 1987. They explain this success in part as instead of discovering pre-existing price regularities, the model was used by traders to anticipate option prices in their arbitrages. As a result, option prices came to correspond to the theoretical prices derived from the BSM model. In the present article I show that this is not a completely correct conclusion, since the BSM model never became a self-fulfilling model. I would claim that the October 1987 stock market crash is empirical proof that the financial world never fit with the economic theory underpinning the BSM.

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists’ engagements with other disciplines—e.g., mathematics, statistics, operations research, physics, engineering, cybernetics—during and immediately after World War II. More controversially, some historians have also argued that the transformation was accelerated by economists’ desires to be safe, to seek the protective coloration of mathematics and statistics, during the McCarthy period. This paper argues that that particular claim 1) is generally accepted, but 2) is unsupported by good evidence, and 3) what evidence there is suggests that the claim is false.