This article intends to assess and compare the main contributions to our discipline of two major authors and authorities. Both of them originated in Central Europe and, later on, went to work in the United States, where their most important books on the subject were published posthumously during the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, besides pertaining to different generations, they also were very unlike from each other.

The eldest, Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), remains much better known among contemporary economists, although very few of them seem to have read in its entirety his imposing History of Economic Analysis (1954a), still a model of our trade. The same probably also applies to his shorter and previous book on the same subject, Economic Doctrine and Method, which had been initially published in Germany forty years earlier, as well as to the essays collected in his Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes.

The ancient Greeks were admired for many things, but particularly for their lack of the corrosive, self-centered complex that leads many authors today to believe that everything started with, and everything originated in, Greece. The ancient Greeks were self-confident enough to accept that they had been influenced by and had absorbed many foreign elements, which their talent then transformed into a new expression of civilization. At a somewhat less mundane level, many ideas that have shaped our thoughts and continue to influence our thinking today, across the world, originated in the past. They were also debated from different points of view in Athens and in other areas in Greece.

Although Jacques Rueff (1896–1978) is known as a liberal thinker, what he means by the term “economic liberalism” should be specified. Indeed, for Rueff, the notion of economic liberalism leads to the notion of the liberal social order: i.e., a situation where the freedom of the individual is maintained and State intervention is justified in order to ensure a harmony of interests. This paper aims to bring out the particularism of the Rueffian liberal social order and to explore the connections between Rueff’s vision of this concept and his specific approach to liberalism, where private property (the pillar of freedom in liberal thinking) may be called into question under certain circumstances.

James Maitland, Lord Lauderdale published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase (1804) only twentyeight years after the publication of the “Inquiry”: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith. A comparison of the titles strongly suggests some relationship, and indeed even glancing through the first few pages of Lauderdale's book confirms this conjecture. The book takes off as a critique of Smith's, and by-and-large remains so till the end. Many of the elements of his criticism can be seen in the difference in the wording of the titles of the two books. Except for “Nations” all the significant words in Smith's title are included in Lauderdale's, but he adds three more: “Origin,” “Means” and “Public” (which is not a substitute for the omitted “Nation”). As we shall see, in his view, ignoring these led to major deficiencies in Smith's work, and Lauderdale set out to point them out, and if possible, to correct them.

What explains the ambition to get rich? Adam Smith is clear that commercial ambition, the passionate desire for great wealth, is not simply a desire to satisfy one’s material needs. His argument on what underlies it, however, is not obvious. I review three possibilities suggested by Smith’s work and the scholarly literature—vanity, the love of system, and the desire for tranquility—and conclude that none of them captures the underlying motive of commercial ambition. Instead, I argue that Smith understands commercial ambition as a misguided desire for excellence. Ambitious pursuers of wealth are driven by the desire to deserve and to enjoy recognition for their excellence, but their judgment of what is truly excellent is corrupted by the standards of a wealth-worshipping society. Instead of appealing to the moral standpoint of the impartial spectator, they construct in their minds and follow a corruptive moral guide: the wealth-worshipping spectator.

I defended my doctoral dissertation on stochastic stability of general equilibrium systems in Penn’s Applied Mathematics program in fall 1968. That year I began teaching math for economists, mathematical economics, microeconomics, and even econometrics at Rutgers College, where I remained for a couple of years before moving to Duke. At Rutgers I saw that graduate students took required courses in micro, macro, statistics, math, and econometrics, and there were electives in other fields like public finance and economic history. I didn’t know that there was any subdiscipline, or field, called the history of economic thought.

I do not think that it would serve much of a purpose to answer Hollander and Peart (1999) point by point, to repeat old arguments, and to once again cite long quotations from Mill. Furthermore, I doubt that the Editor of this Journal would give me the space and time to do so. Instead I propose to ask a number of basic questions about Mill's methodology, give my answers to them and show why I find fault with what I take to be Hollander and Peart's answers. I doubt that this will convince my adversaries. But I hope to show our readers what the major issues are in the disagreement and, perhaps, even to get Hollander and Peart to agree that these are the issues that separate us. If I fail in this latter task they will have the opportunity to point this out in their Rejoinder.

Most Adam Smith scholars hold that Smith endorsed public provision of education to offset deleterious consequences arising from the division of labor. Smith’s putative endorsement of publicly funded education is taken by some scholars as evidence that he tends more toward progressive than classical liberalism, or that this is a departure from, perhaps an inconsistency with, Smith’s otherwise strong presumption against government intervention in markets. This paper argues that these interpretations are flawed because Smith ultimately does not advocate public provision of education. He raises the idea and explores its potential benefits, but he ultimately does not endorse it. Smith also provides reason to be skeptical of public provision of education, which suggests that his final position may have inclined against it.

This paper embeds the early political economy of Friedrich August von Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. The urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to stabilize the disintegrating societal orders is identified as a crucial driver behind the parallelisms between Hayek and the ordoliberals. Their shared theoretical position is that in such moments, liberty can thrive sustainably only after a framework of general and stable rules has been established. Hayek’s proximity to ordoliberalism was most explicitly discernible in The Road to Serfdom and at the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947, culminating in the shared politico-economic vision of the competitive order. The contextual nature of Hayek’s ordoliberalism surfaced in the years after The Constitution of Liberty when his focus shifted, along with the postwar intellectual and institutional stabilization of the West: from how stable orders enable liberty, to how liberty enables the evolution of orders.

This article fills a gap in the literature by examining the only leading classical economist whose influence on Spain has yet to be studied. In particular, it analyzes the influence John Stuart Mill had on nineteenth-century Spain by showing the impact of his multifaceted work both in scientific philosophy and utilitarian philosophy, and in political and economic theory, as well as in the world of feminism.

Benjamin Graham’s amateur proposal for a commodity reserve currency (1937, 1944) has attracted the attention of professional economists and policy makers, but usually for their own prior purposes and designs. This paper places the proposal in the context of Graham’s own time and the intellectual resources available to him, with a view to elucidating both Graham’s own sense of the proposal and the reasons the proposal earned the reception it did.

In this paper we examine the criticism that Knut Wicksell advanced against Léon Walras’s treatment of capital and interest at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the views of two distinguished followers of Walras concerning the points raised by the Swedish economist. As regards the first aspect, it should be noted that the criticism put forward by Wicksell at that time refers to the earlier editions of the Éléments, in which circulating capital is excluded from the analysis. We thus endeavor to clarify Wicksell’s remarks on the consequences of that exclusion for both the representation of the social production process and the determination of the interest rate. As to the second aspect, our discussion indicates that the appropriate way of treating the capitalistic element of production was an unsettled issue within the small circle of Walras’s followers at the end of the nineteenth century.

François Quesnay and the Physiocrats are probably best remembered for three things: the Tableau Economique, their view that only agriculture was productive, and for advocating a single tax on landowners. Over the years, attention has focused on the first two doctrines. Numerous studies of the Tableau have attempted to explain how it operates (Eagly 1974; Eltis 1975; Meek 1963; Pressman 1994; Woog 1950). Adam Smith's (1937, p. 638 f.) critique of the assumption that manufacturing is sterile is well-known. In contrast, there have been few analyses of the single tax proposal. Previous studies have either reported the views of Quesnay and the Physiocrats on taxation (Einaudi 1967) or compared the tax policies of Quesnay to other economists (Buurman 1991).

James M. Buchanan is a unique figure in modern economics. A Nobel Prize winner and a pioneer of public choice theory, he is in some ways a respected pillar of the profession. Yet at the same time, he is an outspoken critic of certain fundamental practices of mainstream economics who refuses to confine his work within the conventional boundaries of the discipline. Whether seen as an innovator or an iconoclast, he has consistently been among the most methodologically and philosophically self-aware of the profession's elite.

In 1883 Henry Sidgwick complained that, with the recent undermining of the authority of political economy, “utterances of dissent from economic orthodoxy” could obtain a ready hearing. This was of particular concern to those writing and teaching on political economy at Cambridge University. As Henry Dunning Macleod was one of the dissenters named by Sidgwick, it appears odd that Macleod was also recognized as a lecturer in political economy at Cambridge between the late 1870s and mid-1880s. This article examines that peculiar occurrence, showing how Macleod exploited the struggle between reformers and conservatives over teaching reform in the university.