John Maurice Clark (1936) described original institutional economics (OIE) as an “elusive movement” and observed, “doubt has arisen whether it has any definable meaning at all” (p. 426). Many subsequent books and articles, with Malcolm Rutherford (2011) being the latest, have addressed this conundrum and sought to identify and describe the animating ideas behind OIE, the people who were the key contributors, and the extent to which they developed a common paradigm vision and theoretical statement. However, widely divergent narratives and non-commensurable interpretations remain. This paper, using a new research strategy, provides another examination of the early OIE story. Rather than beginning with Thorstein Veblen about 1900 (the traditional approach), the paper starts with the founding of OIE in 1918 and examines what the four leading OIE scholars—Walton Hamilton, Clark, Wesley Mitchell, and John Commons—say on OIE’s origins, paradigm vision, and role of Veblen. The conclusions are considerably revisionist.

This paper addresses a long-running debate in the economics literature—the debate over Adam Smith’s theory of money and banking—and argues that recent reinterpretations of Smith’s monetary theory have erroneously diverted historians of monetary thought from the correct, but briefly articulated, initial interpretations of Henry Thornton (1802) and Jacob Viner (1937). Smith did not present either the real-bills theory or a price-specie-flow theory of banknote regulation, as is now generally presumed, but rather a reflux theory based upon the premise that the demand for money is fixed at a particular nominal quantity. Smith’s theory denies that an excess supply of money can ordinarily make it into the domestic nominal income stream or influence prices or employment.

In the current recession, the proposal of negative nominal interest has received widespread attention, not only in the academic world. The negative interest rate issue was originally developed by Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), a German merchant, self-taught economist, and social reformer. In his main work, The Natural Economic Order, Gesell offered a theoretical basis for the practical implementation of the negative interest rate. This proposal, generally known as the “stamped money plan,” was favorably commented upon by two outstanding twentieth-century economists, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, and put into practice during the Great Depression. In this paper I propose a reading of Gesell’s theory of money from the point of view of quantity theory, giving prominence to elements of affinity with Fisher’s monetary theory. This re-examination entails revision of the opinion on the analytical contribution made by Gesell, who was generally tagged as a typical monetary crank, and proves that his place in the history of economic thought is less marginal than previously thought, reinforcing critical appreciation of him.

This article investigates John Maynard Keynes’s understanding and use of the concept of ‘animal spirits’ by tracing how he conceived of related ideas such as human nature, instinct, and intuition, and how they connect to the rational economic agent usually assumed by mainstream economic theory. It also considers the notion of Money-of-Account as proposed in A Treatise on Money in relation to the concept of reciprocal altruism as developed in the field of evolutionary biology, and documents Keynes’s knowledge of Charles Darwin on natural selection and sexual selection. It then uses these threads of analysis to evaluate how Keynes conceived of mental reasoning processes more widely, and deduces his own answer to the question of whether the human mind is formed as a ‘blank slate.’ It concludes by suggesting that Keynes should be regarded as one of the first contributors to the field of evolutionary economic psychology.