Following World War II, the director of the social sciences division at the Rockefeller Foundation, the industrial economist Joseph H. Willits, thought it important to extend its activities to Europe, especially France. His agenda was to strengthen institutional economics and to create modern research centers with a view to stabilizing the political situation. In the postwar decade, almost all economic research centers in France were funded by the Foundation, which helped provide greater autonomy to French economists within academia but failed to reshape French economic training and research.

This paper deals with the initial reception of the Marshall Plan by Georges Bataille and François Perroux in light of the discussion they held in the journal Critique, during the second half of 1948. I argue that Bataille and Perroux took the Marshall Plan as an enigma that current economic and political theories were not able to explain fully. In response, both authors contributed a unique and sophisticated economic analysis to transcend what they perceived as the limited scope of economics. By focusing on this interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper is intended as a contribution to a history of economic thought, taking in the economic inquiry of non-economists and the ways in which they relate to professional economists.

From the late 1930s to the end of World War II, the Japanese government restricted freedom of expression and research. Nevertheless, Zenya Takashima (1904–1990), one of the most influential social scientists in Japan, continued to publish his writings. On an initial reading, he seems to have supported totalitarianism, even though he did not; moreover, he seemed to have agreed with a model of a controlled economy as a historical step, although he did not see this as inevitable. Rather, in order to resist the totalitarian ideology, he adopted a Smithian view of “Shimin Shakai,” or civil society, in which people, by protecting justice, acted freely in the economy. Before Takashima, the concept of civil society was used to express the German concept “bürgerliche Gesellschaft,” but Takashima changed the meaning of the term to a society of equal citizens.

Following Adam Smith’s line of argument, we examine the semantics of four economic principles in Chapter III of the Wealth of Nations that compose his famous proposition “that the division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.” We apply the Natural Semantic Metalanguage framework in linguistics to produce a series of explications that are clear and plain, cross-translatable into any language, intelligible to twenty-first-century readers, and faithfully close to the original text. Our paper explicates Smith’s logical argument in Chapter III and demonstrates how his ideas can be shared among speakers with different linguacultural backgrounds in line with the truly global view of economics that, we argue, Adam Smith had in mind: economics intended as the science of all people living and doing things together with other people to live well and to feel good.

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock took a keen interest in the United States Supreme Court’s reapportionment decisions of the 1960s, which established a “one person, one vote” standard for state legislative apportionment. This paper traces the long arc of Buchanan and Tullock’s opposition to the “one person, one vote” standard. The Calculus of Consent offers a highly qualified efficiency argument against “one person, one vote,” but over time Buchanan and Tullock grew even more vocally critical of the decisions. Buchanan ultimately advocated a constitutional amendment overturning “one person, one vote” in a private set of recommendations to Congressional Republicans. This paper additionally assesses Tullock’s 1987 complaint that scholars and judges neglected The Calculus of Consent’s analysis of reapportionment. A review of the reapportionment literature between 1962 and 1987 demonstrates that while The Calculus of Consent was frequently cited, the literature generally ignored its analysis of the efficiency of apportionment standards.

Luxury has always been an intrinsic part of world history, but the words “luxe” or “luxury” in the conventional sense are quite new, entering the French and English languages only in the seventeenth century. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that the core of this phenomenon came up for discussion in Europe against a backdrop of development of international trade and incipient economic growth. During these debates, the concept of luxury was gradually demoralized by economic liberalism. Translations played a seminal role in the defining of the concept of luxury. European thinkers coordinated their positions even if they disagreed with each other. How was the notion of luxury conceptualized outside the European Roman world? Russia is an interesting example that helps to understand it. The article answers when and why the concept of luxury entered Russian political thought and why luxury, although finding itself outside the bounds of morality, continued to be only condemned in the economic sphere.

This article proposes a historical assessment of harmonic analysis of business cycles and its ability to both decompose and build cycles, as received at the Moscow Conjuncture Institute. It traces how the Fourier transform arrived at the Institute, mediated by Henry L. Moore, in the works and actions of Albert Vainshtein, Nikolai Chetverikov, and Nikolai Kondratiev, ultimately leading to Eugen Slutsky’s well-known 1927 article “The Summation of Random Causes as the Source of Cyclic Processes.” Although the evidence does not warrant the assumption that there was an orchestrated effort at the Institute to push forward a research agenda on harmonic analysis of business cycles, it certainly unfolded as more than the summation of random events and individual incursions. Moreover, the Institute as a whole could have produced much more on this matter if it had escaped Stalinist oppression for at least a few more years.