Morris A. Copeland's work and career as an institutional economist has been the subject of only one significant paper (Millar 1980) and is not well known today, even among institutionalists. The standard histories of institutional economics have tended to focus on a few leading figures, notably Thorstein Veblen, Wesley C. Mitchell, John R. Commons, and Clarence Ayres, and have largely ignored the many others (some of whom had outstanding careers) associated with the movement. This narrow focus has given a misleading impression both of the institutionalist movement itself and also of the nature of the institutionalist contribution to economics. The examination of Copeland's career, treated as a case study in the history of institutional economics, can help correct this problem. Copeland is a perfect candidate for such a case study due to his central place within the interwar institutionalist movement, his teachers, the contacts he maintained, his work in both academic economics and in public service, and his professional standing within economics more generally.

This paper consists of a rhetorical interpretation of two essays published fifty years ago, at the beginning of the so-called “Latin American economic school.” Both were written by the Argentinean economist Raúl Prebisch (1901–1986), who was then working at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). As the most prominent Latin American economist, Prebisch fostered the construction of a theoretical framework that heavily influenced Latin American development policies after World War II.

The last twenty-five years of the twentieth century were freighted with important moments for historians of economic thought: the collapse of the Keynesian consensus, the rise (and fall) of monetarism, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the other Marxist-Leninist states in central and eastern Europe, the rise of neo-liberalism, and arguments over the possible emergence of a “New Economy” following the internet investment boom at the end of the 1990s. Each of these moments will require its own history as we slowly move away from the tumult of the times and begin to weigh them for their own significance. But several of the moments have a common iconic face in Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990. Few other individuals so readily embody the sense of the times. Thatcher's election—a full year and a half before Ronald Reagan's—marks for many people the moment when Keynesian policies finally and irretrievably lost their legitimacy. Likewise, the timing of her election, just two months before Paul Volcker's selection as the chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in the United States, also means that for many people Thatcher's is the public face of monetarism's ascendancy. Finally, there is probably no one person whose name is so clearly associated with the rise of free market thinking and neo-liberalism during the end of the twentieth century.

The government of Margaret Thatcher forms a revealing case study of how economic ideas become entwined with the political and economic history of any country where attempts are made to apply them. As each of the papers in this symposium points out, Thatcher and her government became inextricably associated with “monetarism.” They were influenced by a range of economists, including Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, but the policies that went under the label of monetarism ended up being very different from what one would expect from reading the academic literature on monetarism. Though it shared important features, Monetarism came to mean something very diferent from, for example, Friedman's quantity theory. More significantly, the meaning of monetarism and the way it was applied changed signi cantly during the government's period in office. Many of these changes were in response to specific economic problems that the government was forced to confront. To understand the way economic ideas developed, and why monetarism was interpreted in the way it was, therefore, it is important to understand the macroeconomic history of the period. That is the purpose of this paper.

In a world where transitions to democracy are often turbulent, interrupted, and uncertain, it is easy to think of Britain, where an embryonic form of parliamentary democracy emerged in the seventeenth century as an exception because the basic shape of politics has appeared settled for so long. On the contrary, I will argue, since the 1970s Britain has been fundamentally transformed from a consensus-driven, institutionally cohesive, model West European democracy, into a fractious, institutionally rigid, and quite unresponsive political system. I will suggest that these developments in Britain have broader comparative significance for they help identify a critical shift from social democracy or collectivism to what I call a post-collectivist politics of dissonance.

It is not every literary novice, blushing diffidently over her first manuscript, who easily finds a publisher, still less one prepared to pay an advance of several million pounds. But not every first author has such a story to tell as Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century. It was the previous record holder, Asquith, who first established the notion that retired prime ministers write their memoirs, and he did so under a twin motivation which was not peculiar to himself. He sought vindication and he was after the money.

In the review of Arnold Heertje, ed., The Makers of Modern Economics, Vol. IV, (JHET, September 2001, pp. 394–99), it should have been noted that G. C. Harcourt is an Emeritus Reader in the History of Economic Theory in the Faculty of Economics and Politics at Cambridge (as well as Emeritus Fellow of Jesus and Professor Emeritus of Adelaide) and was a University lecturer at Cambridge College from 1964–66 and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1964–66, following a year's study leave from Adelaide, 1963–64. Several individuals were also incorrectly identified. It should be Kurt (rather than Kermit) Rothschild, Krishna Bharadwaj (rather than Bharadway), Josef (rather than Joseph) Steindl, and Richard Goodwin (rather than Gordon). Paola Tubaro's name was inadvertently misspelled in the Table of Contents of the June 2002 issue of JHET. The Editor apologizes for these errors.