In his autobiographical piece, “A Jevonian Seditionist,” Sidney Weintraub ([1983]1989, p. 50) recalled that in 1957 he sent an offprint of his paper on the micro-foundations of aggregate supply to D. H. Robertson. He remembered that “Robertson generously wrote me that it was ‘lucid and definitive,’ and that thenceforth he would not return to the subject again. I confess that I have lost or misplaced his letter, along with the one by [Alan] Sproul, in my move to Canada, though they were prized possessions.” And I have my own memory of a conversation with Sidney in which he told me that Robertson had written in that letter “If this is not what Keynes meant, it is what he should have meant.”

During a crucial period of United States history, 1880s–1940s, ideas developed in political economy were the core component of a transformation in the way Americans thought about the social and political order. These decades, the era of the elaboration in the United States and internationally of what historians of liberal reform thought refer to as the New Liberalism, were the site of a general reassessment of the constitutive ideologies, Smithian/Lockean liberalism, and a democratized, commercialized version of classical republicanism hanging over from the agrarian republic. Scary, unexpectedly turbulent conditions in an economy plagued by recurrent cyclical downturns in investment and employment, accompanied by unprecedented levels of social conflict, placed a premium on new knowledge. This need arose just as the academic professionalization of the social sciences, the rise of critical political journalism, and highly mobilized women's and labor movements began providing impressive new analytical talent. Efforts to find answers to pressing issues raised by the “social question” were intended initially by most of those involved as a salvage operation for what remained valid among key tenets of American liberalism regarding individualism, competition, the efficacy of the market, and the role of the state. Instead, they led ultimately to a reconstruction in public philosophy, at least on the scale of the one underway since the 1970s, with the “the return of the market,” the unprecedented sway of neoclassicism, and the multidisciplinary appeal of rational choice theory.

Most historians know Robert Lowe (1811–1892) as W. E. Gladstone's first Chancellor (1868–73) and the leading orator against the Reform Bill of 1867. Educationists to this day criticize or praise his Revised Code of 1862, which introduced payment by results in schools. Historians of economic thought add Lowe's critique of relativism (evinced by his views on Ireland) and his stridently classical statements of the role of political economy from his later dispute with the English historical school.

Today we tend to read David Hume's Essays, Moral, Political and Literary in the 1777 edition, a two-part collection dating essentially from the early 1740s and then again from the early 1750s, as revised continually by the author until his death in the year of the American Declaration of Independence. Although this is better than reading the essays in anthologies, even the best text that we have ever had (the Liberty Fund's) is a compendious final version rather than a critical edition, one that would lead us not only into what the essays are but also what they were about. Hume's revisions and afterthoughts are, for the most part, duly noted, but never put into perspective; and his intentions at the outset are underplayed or simply ignored (Hume 1777). Yet it would be a great help to have more clarity on this desire for changes, for it is remarkable in Hume's career. When, very shortly after publication in 1738, he came to feel reservations about the Treatise of Human Nature, he simply scrapped it and wrote new versions of his philosophy. With the Essays, in contrast, he was more tempted than with any other work published in his lifetime, and more chronically tempted, to revise and adapt his thoughts and then resubmit them to the public. With these labors he was not saving or preparing them for posterity so much as constantly adjusting them to the present as he understood it. This is the kind of evidence that might be cited for a recent claim that the Essays are “contemporary history” (Pocock 1999, vol. ii., p.177ff.).