During the sixteenth century, successive waves of gold and silver reached Spain from America and then rolled across Europe to the North and East. Contemporaries made two observations. First, the inflow of bullion was associated with inflation. Second, a given amount of money in a country with relatively low prices tended to exchange for a larger amount of money in a country with relatively high prices. The scholastic doctors in Salamanca who interpreted these observations are traditionally credited with two modern insights, namely the quantity theory of money, and the principle of purchasing-power parity.

In its brief history, the relation between game theory and economics has been characterized by phases of feverish elaboration of new contributions followed by periods in which an open skepticism concerning its usefulness prevailed. Moreover, this vaguely cyclical pattern of evolution has affected various research areas. After an initial period in which game theorists focused their attention on competitive market models, in the 1970s and 1980s they turned to the problems of oligopolistic markets and bargaining. Today the latter research areas are going through a phase of sedimentation and selection while other fields of study receive a strong impulse from the application of game theory.

There is a subset of scholarly literature that asserts that the title of Adam Smith’s famous work, The Wealth of Nations, is an allusion to passages from the Bible, such as Isaiah 60:5. Strong forms of the claim of this relationship between Smith and Scripture argue for a direct reliance of the former upon the latter. Weaker forms of the claim merely raise the possibility of the relationship or point more broadly to the significance and relevance of scriptural passages. This article sets these claims against the historical context of Smith and his work, finding that the relationship among “the wealth of nations,” Adam Smith, and English translations of the Bible demonstrates that Smith did not, in fact, allude to the passages in Isaiah. Thus, the rise of political economy itself, of which Smith’s work was an important element, was part of the background for, and preceded the appearance of, the phrase in English bibles.

This paper discusses the Sonnenschein–Mantel–Debreu (SMD) theorems in general equilibrium theory. It argues that the SMD results were related to the previous literature on the integrability of demand. The integrability question involved rationalizing individual demand functions, and the SMD theorems asked the same question about aggregate (market) excess demand functions. The paper’s two goals are to demonstrate how the SMD results followed naturally from the earlier work on integrability, and to point out that the profession’s reception was quite different; the integrability results were considered a success story, while the SMD results were quite negative.

John Rae, Scottish by birth, and a Canadian-Hawaiian (i.e. of the Kingdom of Hawaii) by residence, lived in Canada for about twelve years before the publication of his only work of significance in economies' and for nine years before he started writing it (James 1965,). He titled his book Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy, Exposing the Fallacies of the System of Free Trade and of Some Other Doctrines Maintained in the “Wealth of Nations” (1834) (obviously not a very memorable or popular title). The book was first conceived as an appendix to a statistical study of an aspect of the Canadian economy but, as sometimes happens, took a life of its own, in which references to Canada became merely illustrative and less frequent than to England, France or even China.

Mandeville and Hume advance similar framings for their political economy, using emergentist and proto-sociological lines of analysis. They are less aligned with liberalism (political, economic, or metaphysical) than mercantilism, insofar as they favor balance-of-trade arguments and urbanization. They are both methodological holists, not individualists. It is the group, not individual agents, that figures at the core of their thought.

Frank D. Graham (1890–1949) presented an innovative multi-country, multi-commodity trade model that attached great importance to link commodities and quantity adjustments, not perfect specializations and price adjustments as emphasized by John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall. However, due to some shortcomings, this model was not sufficiently understood and has been forgotten. This study reconstructs Graham’s theory of international values by rectifying the shortcomings. Through this reconstruction, the following is clarified. First, in multi-country, multi-commodity trade models, the existence of link commodities is general and perfect specializations seldom appear; therefore, quantity adjustments are normally performed in the face of demand shifts. Second, notwithstanding unchanging sectoral productivity at a national level, national wage rates can vary greatly according to the patterns of the international division of labor. Third, while the domestic relative wage rate increases with an increase in a home country’s productivity of link commodities, it does not increase with an increase in the productivity of commodities produced only in the home country.

This investigation reveals certain modifications and extensions pertaining primarily to the disintegration of the social fabric of capitalist society developed by Schumpeter, with special emphasis on his writings between the years 1942 and 1949, just prior to his death in 1950. Three publications during the period which hold particular significance are Prime and Henderson (1975), “Schumpeter on Preserving Private Enterprise” (an address by Schumpeter to a group of Quebec businessmen in November 1945); J.A. Schumpeter, “The March into Socialism,” AER, May 1950 (a paper presented on December 30, 1949); and J.A. Schumpeter, notes on “American Institutions and Economic Progress,” (late 1949). These more recent views are exposed and compared with Galbraith's rationalizations on the contemporary corporate economy. It is well known that Schumpeter, the theorist, was willing to express tendencies but was hesitant to relate the specific outcome of the future of capitalism. However, Galbraith was quite precise in his interpretation of the transition to modern capitalism.

The standard view on John Bates Clark is that his The Philosophy of Wealth (hereafter Philosophy) written in 1886, was simply a reproduction of articles originally appearing in The New Englander (hereafter TNE), the journal that eventually evolved into The Yale Review. This view also holds that Philosophy represents Clark's so-called (Christian) socialist period that he abandoned sometime after 1886, and that he then began the process of development that resulted in his marginal productivity theory of distribution and a more generally conservative or precapitalist position.

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.

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.

The paper offers the first interpretation of David Ricardo’s famous numerical example fully compatible with the primary source. It claims that the sole purpose of the four numbers was to illustrate that the relative value of commodities made in different countries is not determined by the respective quantities of labor devoted to their production. This exception results from unequal ordinary profit rates between countries because capital does not move across national borders as easily as it does within the same country. Likewise, the paper also debunks some entrenched myths about the numerical example. It shows that Ricardo did not leave the terms of trade indeterminate, that the purpose of the four numbers was not about measuring the gains from trade, and that Portugal had no productivity advantage over England. All of this contradicts the way scholars have interpreted Ricardo’s numerical example since the mid-nineteenth century.