Knut Wicksell’s formulation of monetary economics as the study of the relation between aggregate supply and aggregate demand played an important role in the development of macroeconomics. Wicksell’s contributions are better understood if we consider the Walrasian roots of his approach. Wicksell pointed to two shortcomings of Léon Walras’s theory: incomplete treatment of the demand for money, and lack of a concept of capital stressing the time element. Wicksell was influenced by Walras’s notions of the tâtonnement by which markets solve the equations and of the zero-profit entrepreneur. Nevertheless, Wicksell’s interpretation of the dynamics of the credit market, with a price (interest rate) distinct from its equilibrium (“natural”) level and the implicit recognition that the latter could assume negative values, did not fit into the Walrasian tâtonnement mold. As the first to produce textbooks on both theories of value and money, Wicksell was confronted with the problem of how to establish connections between them.

A few years after the publication of The General Theory, a number of economists began to present John Maynard Keynes’s model, identified with IS-LM, as a particular case of the Walrasian model. This view of IS-LM has often been rationalized by a basic syllogism: IS-LM was invented by John Hicks, Hicks was a Walrasian, hence IS-LM was Walrasian. But as some historians of macroeconomics have shown, this syllogism is false. Considering this confusion as an established fact, this article studies how and why IS-LM came to be considered as Walrasian. It shows that the standard view took its roots in “The Rate of Interest and the Optimum Propensity to Consume,” a paper published by Oskar Lange in 1938, and resulted from a need to clarify the foundations of Keynes’s theory.

Historians of economics have acknowledged the significant role François Quesnay and the Physiocrats played in the early development of mathematical economics. It is, however, important to note that although the Tableau économique could well be translated into algebra, Quesnay never did it. As part of our research on Charles Richard de Butré, an obscure collaborator of François Quesnay, we have uncovered documents that show that he was one Physiocrat who did use algebra to explain his theoretical conceptions. In two texts written at the end of 1766 and the beginning of 1767, Butré systematically used algebra as an aid for economic reasoning. Our argument is that these texts provide very interesting insights into the development of early mathematical economics.

Having in the General Theory quoted a passage from John Stuart Mill’s Principles as representative of ancient confusion, John Maynard Keynes has been accused of misinterpreting that passage and thus mistakenly identifying Mill as an upholder of the “classical” proposition that “supply creates its own demand.” Certain critics, seizing on Keynes’s misunderstanding, draw the conclusion that little was actually wrong with Mill’s analysis and that Keynes’s attack on Mill was therefore without justification.

Our contention, however, is that, despite his error with respect, so to say, to the “letter” of Mill’s exposition, Keynes was right about the essential “substance” of Mill’s thesis. Mill’s thinking, we suggest, was deeply in thrall to the ideas of his father and Jean-Baptiste Say. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Mill did indeed stand for a “classical” position, albeit qualified, but nevertheless vulnerable to Keynes’s critique as developed in the General Theory.

The economics of education gradually became institutionalized in the period following the Second World War. Human capital theory was the central pillar in this process. Nevertheless, it did not go unchallenged. The first challenges came from within the mainstream itself, but economists affiliated to other paradigms also called human capital theory into question. This applied in particular to the work of the radical economists. The aim of this article is to document this critical episode in the history of ideas in the economics of education. To that end, the nature of the radical economists’ critique is examined and it is shown how it connects to human capital theory.

In the history of economic thought Otto Neurath, who is known foremost for spearheading the development of the Vienna Circle of philosophers, has served largely as a foil for his advocacy of in-kind calculation and economic planning. Yet Neurath, who was trained as an economist and wrote extensively about economics, including its philosophical foundations, held an abiding interest in the use of language in science, and was strongly influenced by turn-of-the-twentieth-century conventionalists, among them Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem. Consequently, Neurath’s critique of what he saw as the conceptual flaws of economics and its too narrow framework as price theory was rooted as much in its imprecise and ‘unsorted’ use of language as in his critical view of capitalism. As such, he anticipated the ‘linguistic turn’ in economics that gained prominence only a half-century later, without any recognition of his presaging role.