The evolution of Ferdinando Galiani’s thought toward social mathematic has been neglected by scholars, and his attempt to establish political arguments on the analytical basis remains unexplored. The non-systematic nature of Galiani’s intuitions, due to his laziness, largely justifies this underestimation of his scientific program. This paper intends to show that the mature abbé Galiani follows an intellectual itinerary autonomous and parallel to that followed by Marquis de Condorcet in the same years. The anti-Physiocratique querelle represents Galiani’s methodological maturation. In contrast with Physiocratic economic doctrine, based on the primacy of deductive methodology, Galiani claims for economic science the realism of circumstance against aprioristic axiomatic hypotheses and rationalist generalizations. Galiani’s project, substantially similar to Marquis de Condorcet’s approach to social science, can be defined as Newtonian social mathematics opposed to Physiocratic Cartesian social mathematics.

Nicholas Curott attempts to correct some misrepresentations of Adam Smith’s monetary and banking analyses. However, failing to recognize Smith’s adoption of David Hume’s quantity theory of price levels and the price-specie-flow mechanism, Smith’s distinction between money and credit and their sources, and Smith’s suggestion of real, rather than “fictitious,” bills as safer for private bank lending, Curott denigrates Smith’s theory of money and banking as inferior to some modern writers’. Curott also mischaracterizes Smith’s money demand function, which is best represented as a rectangular hyperbola. I draw from the Wealth of Nations to correct Curott’s misrepresentations of Smith’s analyses.

The Ricardian dynamics are based on the study of the order of cultivation when demand increases. Piero Sraffa criticized David Ricardo for having assumed that the incoming method is defined by a natural order, and stressed that the law of succession of methods is based on a profitability criterion. Then, in the case of intensive cultivation, the question is whether the incoming method is indeed more productive than the one it replaces. Sraffa’s argument relies on the positivity of rent. However, there is a flaw in his reasoning, and a failure of the Ricardian dynamics is possible. Post-Sraffian scholars have misunderstood that construction and have substituted a static approach for it. The critiques they address to Sraffa are better understood by returning to Ricardo and Sraffa’s own methodology. Fifty years ago, mathematicians rediscovered Ricardo’s approach independently and worked out a powerful algorithm inspired by it.

Through his philosophical treatises, John Locke is perceived as the founder of political liberalism. However, from a different perspective, he can also be seen as a mercantilist. To show that there is no complete incompatibility between Locke’s philosophical treatises and his economic essay, I stress the central role of money. Money leads to a conflict, which is usually described as a conflict between “haves” and “have nots” (Macpherson 1962; Vaughn 1980; Caffentzis 1989). I complete this analysis showing that the introduction of money in the state of nature also leads to an uncommon conflict within the owners’ class between “landed men” and “moneyed men.” I also argue that this transition from a state of peace to a state of unrest leads to the establishment of a government whose role is to avoid the escalation of the conflict into a state of war.

This essay was originally read at the conference of the Society of Economists at the Kiev Institute of Commerce on November 14, 1913, to mark the 250th anniversary (in 1912) of the appearance of William Petty's first economic treatise. It was subsequently published in the Student Bulletin of the same institute (1914, Numbers 16, 17, 18).

Publishing this essay in the form of a separate pamphlet I, of course, acknowledge its extreme incompleteness in many respects, but think that the extreme poverty of Russian literature about such a wonderful economist justifies its worth.

In 1901, Correa Moylan Walsh gained renown for writing a groundbreaking monograph on index numbers. His contributions to monetary economics, however, though neglected, transcend his work on index numbers, which was conceived to serve more foundational concerns of his. Therefore, our aim is twofold. First, we want to recover Walsh’s role as an important early twentieth-century economist. Second, we intend to provide a wider account of his incursion into monetary economics. Our argument is that the cornerstone of Walsh’s approach to the science of money is not confined to index numbers but concerns his distinction between different kinds of economic value and the discussion regarding the kind of value that money should measure and store. As such, we identify Walsh’s 1903 book, The Fundamental Problem in Monetary Science, as his archetypical work.

The history of economics in the US prior to the twentieth century remains a distinctly under-explored subject—a lacuna that the present symposium seeks to fill, if only in part. Building on the articles that appear in the symposium, this essay takes up a small set of thematic issues related to the developments in American economics in the nineteenth century and points to the issues and challenges in writing the history of this important period.

In a recent article in this Journal, Robert Ekelund (1997) has renewed his criticism of the discussion of price formation in William Thornton's On Labour (1869) and criticized the work of “modern supporters” of Thornton, such as Kenneth Dennis, Philip Mirowski, Takashi Negishi and myself. While that work differs in the precise significance attributed to On Labour, there is agreement that Thornton's critique of contemporary explanations of “the laws of supply and demand” and/or his discussion of price formation do not warrant the negative and dismissive treatment they have often received from historians of economics. Ekelund disagrees. Based on “preposterous notions,” Thornton's work was “worse than nonsense” and, as he did not understand contemporary explanations of supply and demand, he should “receive a grade of ‘F’; (with strongly worded advice to return to the pursuit of poetry and sociology)” (Ekelund, 1997, pp. 11, 20, 21). Five examples are given below showing that this evaluation of On Labour depends on misinterpretation of the meaning, context and significance of Thornton's analysis.

The paper is dedicated to Suzanne de Brunhoff’s monetary thought and shows how her analysis of very concrete monetary and financial problems of her time led her to develop the most innovative contributions to Marxist theory of money since classical Marxism. Concepts such as non-contemporaneity of capitalism with itself, pseudo-social validation, conflict centralization, or State management of money and labor power reflect her profound analysis of the ways capitalism generates very particular relations to space and time. By looking at this spatio-temporal dimension of de Brunhoff’s concepts, this paper aims to reveal the novelty, power, and fruitfulness of her monetary analysis. The first part of the paper seeks to define the meaning of the concept of general equivalent, drawing on her reading of Karl Marx’s Capital, before situating her approach in relation to institutionalist theories of money. The second part considers de Brunhoff’s analysis of the particular time-spaces of capitalism.

A recent comparative study of the economists' participation in government, draws negative conclusions with respect to this profession in Italy. The Italian case was shown to have been weak both in the teaching of economics at University level and lacking in the provision of a clearly defined and a highly specialized academic training. The complaint that Italian economists were generally devoted to teaching microeconomics, rather than macroeconomics, which is more strongly linked to political and productive demands, has often been heard.

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.