Historians of economic thought typically have seen little or no connection between William Stanley Jevons's economic theory and policy issues. Wesley C. Mitchell, for example, suggested that Jevons had little interest in politics and was uncertain on the questions of the day. He was “basically interested in the subject [of economics] as a science and not as a means of bettering economic organization” (Mitchell 1969, pp. 31, 101-2). Mitchell's comments are curious in view of Jevons's extensive writings on public issues. His book, The State in Relation to Labour (1882), is considered a classic on the subject of policy and a rationalization for interventionist government. Jevons's pronouncement that “we can lay down no hard and fast rules, but must treat every case upon its merits” may well have marked the end of the “liberal era of principles,” according to F. A. Hayek (Hutchison 1978, pp. 100-101). Certainly Jevons intended as much.

Roger Backhouse (Backhouse 2004) has provided both an insightful deconstruction of dissent and a suggested terminology to deal with subtle distinctions within the domain of dissent, especially regarding the status of heterodoxy. There is more to be said, largely in expansion of his analyses—placing his analyses in a larger context. Section I summarizes Backhouse's position and Section II presents my own thoughts.

The paper shows how William Barber’s background as a development economist influenced his research agenda in the history of economic thought, in terms of the questions he asked and the way he approached them. The links between the history of economic theory and of policy-making are highlighted, as well as Barber’s investigation of the engagement of British economists with India’s economic matters throughout the time span of the British East India Company.

The Malthusian population doctrine formed an integral part of both theory and policy in classical economics: “[T]he Malthusian theory lent support to the subsistence theory of wages and prepared the way for the Ricardian preoccupation with the land-using bias of economic progress; by explaining poverty in terms of a simple race between population and the means of subsistence, it provided the touchstone for all classical thinking about economic policy” (Blaug 1997, p. 65). Among historians of economic thought there is probably little in this statement with which to disagree. A variety of interpretations, however, have been given to the subsequent career of the population doctrine, including its place in the economics of Alfred Marshall. Economists after John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter argued, found the population doctrine to be of little theoretical use to economics: many leading economists of the neoclassical school, including Alfred Marshall, “paid their respects to it, even though they no longer based upon it any part of their analytic structures” (1954, p. 890). Mark Blaug, by contrast, suggests that the analysis of population in Marshall's Principles of Economics indicates an “orthodox classical attitude to population problems” (1997, p. 385). Yet another perspective is offered by John Whitaker who remarks that early in his career Marshall resolved to transform the “old political economy into a new science of economics, open to the progressive intellectual and social movements of the day.” His intent was to leave behind the sterile controversies and pessimistic pronouncements of the old political economy, including those associated with the population doctrine (1996, vol. 1, pp. xvii, xx).

In 1933, Portugal was officially converted to a corporatist state, a state where it was accepted that the semi-autonomous bodies representing the various branches of economic and social activity would have formal powers in defining public policies. In such a context, an important change also occurred at the level of economic theories and doctrines, in keeping with the novelties emanating from both the legal and political fields.

Aleksander Bilimovich (1876–1963) is often considered to have been one of the last representatives of the Kiev School of economics, which was influenced by the German Historical School as well as by the emerging neoclassical theory. After the Soviet revolution, Bilimovich continued his work in exile and was developing his theoretical and methodological views along two lines of the Kiev tradition. On the one side he maintained the historical approach, and on the other side he was inclined towards the deductivist and mathematical approach. The paper thus questions the established view among the historians of Russian economic thought of Bilimovich as a consistent adherent of marginalism. His work bears also several features of historicism.

This paper discusses the transition from a perspective in which the determination of income, output, and unemployment was seen as a part of the theory of the business cycle to one in which they are determined independently of the cycle, a transition that meant that the theory of output came to be more sharply separated from the theory of growth. In place of theories of the business cycle, which were rooted in structural changes associated with growth, business cycle theory came to be more of an adjunct to short-run theories. Whereas Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Maynard Keynes were already arguing in terms of the short run by the early 1930s, some American economists continued to think in terms of the business cycle until the very end of the 1930s. This paper shows that for Alvin Hansen and Paul Samuelson, both highly influential figures in postwar economics, the shift came about only because of the need to adduce structural factors to explain the recession of 1937–38 and wartime experience. The focus on income determination as the central macroeconomic problem in Samuelson’s textbook reflected the change in thinking that had happened during the 1940s.

As Kenneth Arrow has pointed out in a recent paper, “David Ricardo was a peaceful man” (Arrow 1991, p. 70). Indeed he was—during his lifetime. I am not so sure he is resting peacefully given the further assertion that his system was “a bold attempt to determine values independent of demand considerations” (ibid., p. 75). Arrow adds, byway of qualification, that he does “not think, as some neo-Ricardians seem to, that there was in any sense an intended repudiation of the demand schedule”; rather Ricardo did not conceive of such a schedule even though “some of [his] analysis can only be made sensible on the basis of such a concept.”

David Ricardo's “On Machinery” chapter continues to interest theorists and historians of economic thought (Blaug 1958, Hollander 1979, Kurz 1984, Samuelson, 1988, 1989, Morishima 1989, Negishi 1990). Yet the addition of the chapter to the third edition of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation arguably overturns much of the view for which Ricardo is so well known (Davis 1989). In the added chapter Ricardo allows, contrary to his original view in the first two editions, that the introduction of machinery is indeed injurious to the class of laborers. More interestingly, because machinery substitutes for labor, wages cannot rise and profits are no longer threatened by rising rents. Effectively the contest between capitalists and landlords of the first two editions of the Principles is replaced in the final edition by one between capitalists and laborers. However, not only does the “On Machinery“ chapter substantially change the distributional argument customarily attributed to the Principles, but it also permits an examination of Ricardo's thinking about distribution in two distinct, but related frameworks. The discussion here compares the distributional analysis in the first two editions with that of the third to explain the general nature of the Ricardo's theory of profit. It does so by providing a novel interpretation of Ricardo's characterization of profit as a residual, and by emphasizing the historical context in which distribution occurred in the beginning of the nineteenth century.

There is an on-going controversy on the interpretation of David Ricardo's wage theory, which has undoubtedly been fueled by the existence of contradictions and difficulties in Ricardo's own treatment of wages. The aim of this paper is to clarify the sources of these difficulties, and to trace their possible historical and analytical reasons. To this end, Ricardo's contribution is put in historical context, and compared with the received doctrine of his time, that is, with Adam Smith's wage theory. This comparison shows that there are many Smithian elements in Ricardo, and that the problems emerge when Ricardo departs from Smith. These problems are essentially the coexistence of Smithian and Ricardian notions of the natural wage in Ricardo's work and the difficulties in reconciling the latter with the distinction drawn by Ricardo between natural and market variables. The reason.for Ricardo's partial departure from Smith, it will be argued, may have been his wish to render more clear-cut his conclusions concerning the tendency of the profit rate to fall in consequence of a rising price of corn. The effort to clarify the difficulties in Ricardo's theory and the comparison with Smith also entail an interpretation that differs in important respects from those found on both the main sides of the controversy over his wage theory.

To declare my case “not proven” is irrelevant. I agree my case is not proven, but all other cases on this topic, including Ahiakpor's, are equally unproven. Arguing about proof here is a waste of time. We simply do not have enough data for deductive certainty or even for the less stringent criterion of “proof beyond reasonable doubt.” The written record is not conclusive and the protagonists are dead. What is not a waste of time, however, is discussing probabilistic inferences from incomplete evidence.

This issue of JHET marks the end of one era and the beginning of another. Don Walker, the only editor that JHET has ever had, has stepped aside after 9 years on the job. Under Don's guidance, JHET developed into a highly respected outlet for scholarship in the history of economic thought, to the point where the supply of high quality submissions prompted the move to quarterly publication in 1988. His labors on behalf of the Journal stretched well beyond the standard editorial function: he handled or oversaw all aspects of the physical production of the Journal, the mailing of the Journal, and numerous other messy details that the present editor has the luxury of passing off to Carfax (that, too, largely owing to Don's efforts).

From Jacob Viner (1927) to David A. Reisman (1998), Adam Smith's departures from an advocacy of laissez-faire in The Wealth of Nations have been interpreted by a number of scholars. In this paper, we examine one of the oddest, and perhaps least noticed, of those departures. That was Smith's defense of the civil law of lay patronage in the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which appears in his discussion of the social benefits and potential social costs of institutions for religious instruction. A lay patron was a non-cleric individual who held the right under civil law to select the minister of a local parish church. In Smith's time, roughly two-thirds of the lay patrons in Scotland were wealthy landowners and one-third were crown officials. In addition, municipal corporations (cities) and universities held some patronage rights.

Endres and Harper (2011) maintain that, within the Austrian tradition of capital theory, Carl Menger and Ludwig M. Lachmann form a distinguishable trajectory. Both these authors, they argue, consider capital as a heterogeneous structure of higher-order goods. In this comment, it is demonstrated that the opposite is true. Menger and Lachmann endorsed contrasting views on the nature of capital. Whereas Lachmann indeed adhered to a heterogeneous capital concept, Menger considered capital to be a homogeneous concept employed in economic calculation.

The association of the equilibrium real rate of interest with the marginal product of capital is a staple of modern mainstream economics. Indeed, when graduate students are asked to find a typical model's equilibrium values of the real wage and interest rate, there is apparently nothing more natural than calculating the derivative of the production function with respect to labor and capital, respectively. This seems to make perfect economic sense, because under competitive conditions, the laborer gets paid the marginal product of his labor, while the capitalist gets paid the marginal product of his capital. Students can even derive the “factor-price frontier” (developed in, for example, Samuelson 1953) to show the inverse relationship between real wages and the real rate of interest, where the “factors” are, of course, labor and capital.

Henry George has many admirers, but only a few scholarly economists would regard him as one of their own. In this paper, I wish to argue not only that Henry George made a sound contribution to political economy; I also claim that his analysis is eminently significant for environmental economics today.