One of the pivotal moments in the move toward mathematizing economics occurred at the turn of the twentieth century, with Leon Walras as perhaps its most ardent champion. Yet, there is no small irony here, in that the leading French mathematicians to whom Walras turned to buttress and defend the case for a mathematical economics, especially Henri Poincare and Emile Picard, laid out reservations to the scope of this mathematizing program. They even pointed to matters, including the hold of the past on future events and hysteresis, a subject already in the discourse of mathematical physicists, which might have fashioned economics differently from the neoclassical mold being formed. This alternate pathway, though, was not pursued at the time.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct and evaluate, among other issues, Hawtrey’s social philosophy.

Hawtrey’s system as a whole is composed of the two distinct and yet interrelated subsystems: philosophy and social philosophy. The former has three components: the theory of evolution and rationalization; the theory of aspects; and Moorean ethics. The latter has two components: his conception of society in general; and his perception of capitalistic economy as one type of society.

We then examine three problematic elements connected with Hawtrey’s system: epistemology in Hawtrey and Moore; plus products and the market; and the ruler and the public.

Dumping actions and anti-dumping policies were regularly on the political agenda for several years in the pre-World War I period in Europe and the United States. In Italy, politics, economic circles, and scholars were engaged in debate on whether to protect sensitive industries threatened by sales below cost in their home markets, practiced by foreign competitors. Einaudi and his school of economics tackled the issue with several publications. In this paper we focus on Jannaccone’s essays, which he contributed to both a symposium in Riforma sociale in March 1914 and an issue in Rivista delle società commerciali in June 1914. Although we recognize that Viner (1923) theoretically systematized dumping in the wider framework of international trade, we nevertheless claim that the theoretical origin of dumping, in a context of imperfect competition, was Jannaccone’s essay. We show that Jannaccone proposed an early theory of dumping as an instance of the more general theory of price discrimination. He defined and classified dumping; he developed a static analysis of its profitability; he investigated the effects of dumping in both domestic and foreign markets; and he analyzed the effect of protectionism and its policy implications.

The article analyzes the economic entries of the main Spanish general encyclopedias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Diccionario enciclopédico (1887–1898) and Enciclopedia universal (1908–1930). Both works include the contributions of prestigious Spanish and Latin American intellectuals, and were designed for distribution in Spain and Latin American markets. Diccionario enciclopédico was the first to introduce the “social question” in its economic entries, which were drafted by the most outstanding Spanish economists at the time. These entries were characterized by the absence of any significant mention of historicism and marginalism, which illustrates the isolationism of Spanish economists during the late nineteenth century. Enciclopedia universal, on the other hand, was not entirely drafted by academic economists. Nevertheless, its economic entries account for a complete outline of marginalism, Marxism, and historicism. Apart from the traditional goals of compiling the intellectual advances made in any area of human knowledge for educational purposes, the economic entries of both encyclopedias aimed at popularizing some kind of economic knowledge in order to prepare minds for the reception of specific doctrines and agendas: the secular social doctrine of Spanish Krausism and the religious Social Catholicism, respectively.

The integration of money into the Walrasian general equilibrium scheme is an age-old and intricate issue. One of the first attempts was made by Gustavo Del Vecchio, who, in the early twentieth century, built a theory of circulation that considered money as a medium of exchange, and investigated its organizational and social aspects in depth. Del Vecchio developed a theory of monetary service grounded on the distinction between individual and social utility of money. Moreover, he stated that money, credit, accumulation, and crisis could no longer be theorized with time omitted, and this induced him to formulate dynamic statements that put forward claims about money as a store of value. The organizational and social dimensions of money, time, and uncertainty were all important and interconnected aspects in Del Vecchio’s scientific inquiry, for they all sprang from his conceptualization of money as a medium of exchange.