The paper draws on Stephen Siegel (1984) to argue that, while paving the way for constitutionalizing the free market in Lochner v. New York (1905), the reproduction cost method that the Supreme Court established in Smyth v. Ames (1898) as the preferred technique for assessing the value of a business for regulatory purposes also exposed the conventional character of any valuation exercise, against the claims of objectivity made by classical economists and mainstream jurists. The inconsistency between recognizing that “value is not a fact” and the classical laissez-faire philosophy underlying the Court’s jurisprudence did not escape progressive critics, who concluded that government could legitimately fine-tune regulation in order to affect a business’s value and pursue alternative socio-economic goals.

Ralph G. Hawtrey was not a man of the backwaters. Through the parallel study of Treasury files and Hawtrey’s scholarly publications, this work reveals his direct influence upon the most commanding minds of the Treasury and the Bank of England, the two institutions that, after WWI, shared primary responsibility over the British austerity agenda. After the war, Hawtrey advocated drastic budgetary and monetary rigor in the name of price stabilization. From 1922, Hawtrey admitted the need to decrease the bank rate; yet he remained an adamant supporter of the gold standard, insisting on its maintenance even if it required further monetary revaluation. Hawtrey’s policy prescriptions stemmed directly from his economic model. The “crowding-out argument,” the centrality of credit and of savings, together with the operational priority of technocratic institutions, were essential theoretical underpinnings of Hawtrey’s agenda: implementing the so-called Treasury view.

John Maynard Keynes consistently offered qualified endorsement of Abba Lerner’s “functional finance” doctrine—the qualifications particularly turning on Keynes’s attentiveness to policy management of the psychology of the debt market. This article examines Keynes’s understanding of the possible influence of public debt on interest rates, from 1930 forward. With the multiplier a mechanism whereby debt-financed public investment generates matching private saving (net of private investment) plus public saving, it becomes possible for Keynes to conclude that increasing public debt need not place upward pressure on the level of interest rates, so long as policy can successfully manage the psychology of the debt market. This particularly concerns long interest rates and hence the term structure of rates. His theory of the term structure enables Keynes’s conviction that policy can manage and shape long rates. The conclusion considers also whether Keynes’s caution concerning public debt and interest rates retains relevance today.

The interdisciplinary project to unite the field of mathematics with the social and biological sciences marks the work of Vito Volterra, one of Italy’s most prominent mathematicians of the twentieth century. This paper explores the connections between Volterra’s 1901 inaugural address at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and the work of two of his contemporaries, Léon Walras and Irving Fisher. All three thinkers were ardent advocates of the mathematical turn in economic thinking. This paper argues, however, that it is the previously unexplored relationship between Volterra and Fisher that sheds the most light on the way in which mechanical physics contributed to the project of mathematization within economics more generally. Furthermore, it explores the way in which mathematical inquiry postulated a new and coherent abstraction of the economy, at the same time that it gave epistemological authority to the economist.

This article examines the early regulation of futures markets in the 1920s and 1930s. We contrast the analysis of speculation developed by the Grain Futures Administration (GFA) with Holbrook Working’s. Within the GFA we focus on Paul Mehl, who directed the statistical analysis of order flows, trade volumes, and positions that supported the GFA’s policy recommendations. In retrospect Working was the most prominent academic analyst of futures markets. The relationship between the GFA and Working was complex and at times intimately collaborative, but the New Deal provoked sharp disagreement. Working rejected the tighter trading rules advocated by the GFA as counterproductive and tried to persuade the Secretary of Agriculture to embrace a discretionary approach to regulation based upon his analysis of neighboring futures prices (the Working curve) and his distinctive conception of “perfect markets”—a nuanced version of the subsequent efficient market hypothesis.

This paper examines James Steuart’s explanation of the emergence of commercial nations. Unlike other Scottish thinkers of the time, Steuart argues that artifice is necessary for the rise of commercial societies. He uses the term “artificial” to refer to a devised process, one that is an alternative to the supposedly natural process arising from innate propensities. The system of trade and commerce is an “artifice” created by merchants to obtain benefits, and established by the sovereign for his ostentation and personal prestige, until it became generalized as a commercial nation. Steuart’s explanation of the emergence of commercial nations accounts for how individuals become dependent on and subordinate to the public market. This paper concludes that Steuart’s Political Œconomy promotes a science of the artificial that seeks to understand the functioning of non-natural mechanisms and to create instruments that the statesman adapts to the needs and objectives of individuals.