Allin Cottrell's criticisms of my paper fall into three general categories: criticisms of the paper I did not write, criticisms of the paper I claimed to write, and criticisms of the paper he thinks I was really writing. Let me try to address each of these categories, emphasizing the more substantive points he raises about the paper I claimed to write.

In my note on dissent (2004), I emphasized that heterodoxy and dissent had to be defined socially. Given that crucial elements of the social context differ from one society to another, it follows that the meaning and significance of dissent may vary too. Barnett (2006) has pointed out a conclusion I should have drawn explicitly: that my suggestions for thinking about dissent make sense only in Western economics. In the former Soviet Union, as he points out, dissent in economics could not be understood apart from the political situation. The examples he cites illustrate some of the ways in which dissent in Soviet economics differed from that in the West, where there was no officially sanctioned orthodoxy comparable to Marxism-Leninism (or rather to what the Soviet authorities chose to call by that name) from which economists wished either safely to signal their dissent or to which they wished, despite their dissent, to be seen to adhere. We see here, it might be argued, a simple difference between two types of society.

The article contrasts an intellectual history perspective on the transition from classical to neo-classical economics with doctrinal accounts of the marginal revolution. Marshall’s opinions on the mixture of theoretical, methodological, and moral and political elements involved in the generational divide shows that more was at stake than accounts in which theory alone is stressed suggest. It is also argued that in other respects less was at stake: drawing a sharp dividing line between pre- and post-marginal treatments of policy issues does not do justice to underlying continuities in the empirical utilitarian tradition. The article is dedicated to the memory of R. D. C. (Bob) Black, whose work on Jevons illustrates the benefits of an intellectual historian’s approach to this significant transition in economic thinking.

Léon Walras was a truly revolutionary economist. Not only did he leave a lasting mark on economic doctrine participating in the Marginalist Revolution, which supplanted the labor theory of value of the classical school, but he also contributed to major changes in economic methodology as being one of the first and most ardent promoters of the use of mathematics in economics. For an actor who played such a great role in the development of economics, how did he conceive his scientific endeavor? This question can be broken down into two different but related questions: First, how did he know that he had found true scientific laws? What was his theory of knowledge? Is it best described as empiricist (claiming that all knowledge comes from experience) or idealist (claiming that reason can achieve knowledge independently of experience)? And, second, what relation did his writings on pure theory bear with his policy prescriptions? Was there a normative bias in Léon Walras's methodology, i.e., were his positive statements molded by his normative inclinations?

This last set of questions has generated much debate, given that Walras actively fought for scientific rigor while not refraining from defending his views on the desired social order. For W. Jaffé, who unearthed his correspondence, a careful study of primary evidence shows that Walras's conception of justice heavily influenced his search for pure truth. The Éléments d'économie politique pure (Éléments), “appears, on the surface, as a competely wert-frei” system, but it is nevertheless “inform[ed]” by “implicit moral convictions” (Jaffé 1977, p. 371). However, D. A. Walker has strongly attacked Jaffe's allegation that Walras's theory of general equilibrium was deliberately constructed as a normative scheme, pointing to Walras's “careful distinctions between normative and positive subject matters” (Walker 1984, p. 466).

This paper provides a refutation of the “absolute immizeration” doctrine that S. Hollander attributes to Marx, by emphasizing the Marxian original categories and laws of capitalist production in order to base Marx’s opposition to this doctrine on his more profound opposition to Classics about the law of supply and demand for labor.

The paper proceeds as follows: first, it is shown that the Marxian subsistence wage does not exclude population growth. Second, the analysis of surplus population will reveal how it is not only a condition of the business cycle, but also one of its immediate results. In this sense, the so-called theory of dual labor force, which Hollander uses to discard the role of surplus population in the decreasing real-wage trend, proves a misunderstanding of the origin and nature of the industrial reserve army.

From the labor demand side, on the other hand, the endogeneity of technical progress precludes any “ongoing process” of increasing organic composition of capital. Finally, it will appear that categories of labor power, wages defined as the value of labor power, or laws such as decreasing necessary labor and increasing surplus labor, allow Marx to develop a law of supply and demand for labor partly unrelated to the number of workers and the evolution of population growth, which necessarily rules out any birth-rate control policy.

The History of Economics Society (HES)—together with its Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET)—has played an important role in my activities as a historian of economic thought, from my early exciting days as a graduate student in 1994–95 to my term as HES president in 2016–17, and beyond. As I join the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the HES, I would like to offer some historiographic perspectives on its history as based mostly on my shared memories and personal trajectory. My first participation at a HES conference took place in 1994, when I presented a paper in the history of macroeconomics. Those meetings were presided, at Babson College (Boston), by Laurence Moss, who used the “Perlman system” of paper presentation by the discussants followed by reactions by the authors. I was lucky to have Bradley Bateman as my discussant. Brad kindly agreed with the argument of my paper about Frederick Barnard Hawley’s anticipation of John Maynard Keynes’s principle of effective demand, published two years later in the History of Political Economy (HOPE).

Wild price swings following World War I motivated some economists and their allies to start a stable money campaign. John R. Commons joined this campaign, and the story of his participation opens a window into an historical learning episode in which the campaign, though it failed, sparked intellectual efforts and interacted with events in ways that changed beliefs about relations between central bank actions, on the one hand, and unemployment, inflation, and economic growth, on the other. The paper dwells on Commons’ role and on the long learning experience that led participants to conclusions they could not have anticipated when they embarked on their campaign.

According to Alfred Marshall, the element of time is the most important and difficult aspect to deal with in the economic analysis. Accordingly, he has placed the concept of time at the core of his economic reasoning, and he has developed a number of analytical tools that allow including time in his analytical framework: most notably, the cœteris paribus pound, the representative firm, and the distinction between short and long periods. However, he encountered an insurmountable impasse when dealing with the real elapsing of time in his static framework: the solution proposed in his Principles of Economics remained, for him, highly unsatisfactory, problematic, and incomplete. The real elapsing of time—unavoidable in his reflections—copes very badly indeed with his analytical construction based on equilibrium. The continuity of time is the element of the Marshallian analysis most quickly criticized and rejected. After him, in the economic analysis, time gradation was rigorously divided into “short” and “long” periods, whereas Marshall’s concerns for the continuity of real time were banished from what was considered a “rigorous” analysis. The main aims of this paper are to frame Marshall’s distinction between short and long periods and to underline those aspects of his contribution that were lost or were substantially simplified in later literature.

This paper is an attempt to historicize Frank Plumpton Ramsey’s Apostle talks delivered from 1923 to 1925 within the social and political context of the time. In his talks, Ramsey discusses socialism, psychoanalysis, and feminism. Ramsey’s views on these three intellectual movements were interconnected, and they all contributed to his take on the policy debates occurring then on the role of women in economy. Drawing on archival materials, biographical facts, and the historiographical literature on the early interwar politics of motherhood, I show that Ramsey held a positive view of the feminist campaign for family endowment. He demanded government financial support for motherhood in recognition of the economic significance of women’s domestic works, which, as such, could bring economic independence to them. In addition, he found such an economic scheme compatible with the kind of maternalism endorsed by Freudian psychoanalysis—his favorite theory of psychology.

During his first presidential term, faced with antitrust law reform, Woodrow Wilson had to deal with the reconstitution of conflicting values. These were, on the one hand, the importance of efficiency, guaranteed by the role of experts capable of effectively managing public administration; and, on the other hand, the importance of public and democratic participation, and therefore respect for traditional democratic values. Wilson faced a theoretical impasse in defining concepts such as competition and fairness when developing antitrust laws and had to put his theory of administration to the test. He opted for a pragmatic approach, based on managerial ideas and integrating the figure of the manager, expert in know-how.

This article argues that Western impressions of the Chinese pre-modern monetary experience might have been excessively colored by Marco Polo’s favorable commentary on the stability of the Mongol polity and its dissemination of paper money. Experiments with unconvertible paper money had ultimately been no more successful in late-imperial China than they were in the early-modern West. By 1430, in fact, the Ming dynasty was forced to abandon the issuance of paper money altogether. The genesis of paper money both in China and it the West had originally emanated from private institutions. However, royally chartered banks of issue were conspicuously absent from the Chinese setting until the late nineteenth century.