By the time Joseph A. Schumpeter was well into the writing of his History of Economic Analysis. that is, in the late 1940's, shortly before his death, Paul A. Samuelson was already well known in the higher circles of the profession for his precocity and brilliance.2 But, if later his impact on the discipline was to be ceremonialized, and quite accurately as such appelations go, as the Age of Samuelson, was this dimly if at all anticipated by Schumpeter when he wrote the History? How did Schumpeter treat Samuelson therein and was it different from his treatment of other contemporary economists, such as Milton Friedman, John R. Hicks, Oscar Lange, Abba Lerner, Franco Modigliani, and George Stigler, all of whom, for example, figure in the History?

This paper focuses on the intellectual path through which Raúl Prebisch placed industrialization at the center of his economic thought and policy recommendations. It shows how the changing international context of the 1930s and 1940s made him depart from laissez-faire and adopt countercyclical policies, gradually abandoning the agrarian export-led growth model and finally embracing industrialization as the new growth strategy for Argentina and Latin America.

This paper examines two competing proposals for reforming and reviving confidence in the world monetary system, and the two economists, Robert Triffin and Fritz Machlup, who led the charge, one for centralized reserves, and the other for flexible exchange rates. Triffin would later claim that no one did more to ensure that floating exchange rates emerged the winner in the policy debate than Machlup because of his influence on academic economists and policy makers through the Bellagio Group conferences. The Bellagio Group conferences and Machlup’s leadership role are examined.

In 1971, Joan Robinson entered into a debate with the American neoclassical economist C.E. Ferguson in the Canadian Journal of Economics over the efficacy of the neoclassical theory of capital in light of the Cambridge Controversies raging at the time. Recent archival evidence from the Martin Bronfenbrenner Papers at Duke Archive has uncovered a heretofore lost reply Ferguson wrote to Robinson on or around September 1971, three months before his death. That reply is published for the first time as an Appendix to this article. Uncovering this reply, as well as correspondence between Ferguson, Bronfenbrenner, and Solow, shines a light into the American neoclassical camp of the late 1960s and early 1970s as the early phase in the Cambridge Controversies was drawing to a close.

Every theory of value has to perform certain tasks. In the narrowest sense, it must explain ratios of exchange on the market. But it must also give an account of social costs and benefits, and their distribution among individuals and groups. Value theory must relate human beings to the physical and biological realities. It must explain the relations between persons and groups. In fulfilling all these tasks, value theory reflects philosophical beliefs about how human beings perceive and react to nature and to each other.

In his recent article, Robert Dimand details for the profession the existence of four obscure papers by Irving Fisher (1935, 1936, 1937, 1940). He also brings to our attention two brief Econometrica contributions (Fisher 1946, 1947), neither of which is listed in the American Economic Association's Index of Economic Journals, as he points out. For this, and for his careful discussion of the content of those papers, we are indeed in his debt.

There was no Jevonian revolution in international trade theory. The new ideas of marginal analysis entering British economics in the late nineteenth century seem to have left the field untouched. According to Schumpeter (1954, p. 609), Marshall “did not do more than polish and develop Mill's meaning … Edgeworth's famous restatement added many interesting details but also did not go beyond Mill in fundamentals.”

Jacob Viner’s The Customs Union Issue, published in 1950, is the one undeniable classic in its field. The first part of this paper traces the development of Viner’s thinking on preferential trading arrangements, places his work in context, and clarifies his position on disputed issues. The second part considers the reception of his work, from the enthusiastic early reviewers to the international economists who further developed the theory of customs unions, to contemporary practitioners. While practitioners consistently misread Viner, these misreadings were scientifically fruitful, and there are reasons why fruitful science might flow from poor contextual history. Among contemporary international economists, the book has become a classic, marking off and justifying a field of enquiry.

In the history of economic thought Otto Neurath, who is known foremost for spearheading the development of the Vienna Circle of philosophers, has served largely as a foil for his advocacy of in-kind calculation and economic planning. Yet Neurath, who was trained as an economist and wrote extensively about economics, including its philosophical foundations, held an abiding interest in the use of language in science, and was strongly influenced by turn-of-the-twentieth-century conventionalists, among them Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem. Consequently, Neurath’s critique of what he saw as the conceptual flaws of economics and its too narrow framework as price theory was rooted as much in its imprecise and ‘unsorted’ use of language as in his critical view of capitalism. As such, he anticipated the ‘linguistic turn’ in economics that gained prominence only a half-century later, without any recognition of his presaging role.

Richard Jones’s 1831 critique of David Ricardo’s theory of rent is generally viewed as ill-founded. The present paper shows that Jones’s Essay on the Distribution of Wealth contains an important analytical insight: Jones noticed that Ricardo’s treatment of agricultural improvements was seriously incomplete, because it failed to accommodate the historically important case of agricultural improvements that involve the use of fixed capital. More generally, it is suggested that Jones was correct in pointing out that Ricardo had not properly taken into account fixed capital in his analysis of rent and of agricultural improvements.

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, we show that some theoretical continuities exist between the approaches of Bernard Mandeville, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith to the division of labor and the contemporary analyses of technical change and economic dynamics, which consider innovation as a process of technological creation. We thus offer a further exploration of the origins of evolutionary ideas in the history of evolutionary economics. Second, despite the existence of these theoretical continuities, we highlight the differences between the Scottish Enlightenment authors and the modern evolutionary economists on the issue of temporality and the place of history in their reflections.

In a world where transitions to democracy are often turbulent, interrupted, and uncertain, it is easy to think of Britain, where an embryonic form of parliamentary democracy emerged in the seventeenth century as an exception because the basic shape of politics has appeared settled for so long. On the contrary, I will argue, since the 1970s Britain has been fundamentally transformed from a consensus-driven, institutionally cohesive, model West European democracy, into a fractious, institutionally rigid, and quite unresponsive political system. I will suggest that these developments in Britain have broader comparative significance for they help identify a critical shift from social democracy or collectivism to what I call a post-collectivist politics of dissonance.

Students of economics no longer study the history of economic thought for the simple reason that it is much too difficult. It requires a lot of reading of books that do not have convenient introductions and summaries, and so it takes up far too much time. As a consequence, most economists are not familiar with the great names of the past and are unable to place modern analyses in historical, or any other, perspective.