None of the existing scholarly literature has explored or appreciated Director’s great respect for Hayek or their relationship. This paper explores the relationship of Hayek and Director, and argues that Director should be viewed as a disciple of Hayek in the immediate post-war period. Newly available archival material in the Director Papers at the University of Chicago as well as material in the Hayek Papers allow for a deeper appreciation of their relationship than was previously possible. The archival record indicates that the central arc of their relationship occurred from 1945 to roughly 1950, when they heavily corresponded, and primarily focuses on this pivotal time period. Through exploring the relationship of Hayek and Director, this paper challenges the frequent claim that Hayek did not influence the post-war Chicago School, and argues that, starting in 1946, Hayek, even though he was not yet at Chicago, influenced the initial intellectual trajectory of the post-war Chicago School through his disciple Director.

In his 1898 article Why is Economics Not An Evolutionary Science ,Thorstein Veblen criticized the Austrian School (as represented by Carl Menger) for being unable to break with the classical tradition that economics is a taxonomic science(Veblen 1898, p. 73). The Austrian failure was attributed to a "faulty conception of human nature (ibid.).

The paper critically discusses some recent contributions to the literature that argue that Smith incorporated the needs of the poor within his account of justice. Three specific claims are examined and rejected: that Smith blurred the traditional distinction between perfect and imperfect rights; that he endorsed the doctrine of the right of necessity; and that he maintained that all people have a natural right to subsistence.

It is now easy to see, in the light of Adam Smith's Lectures on Jurisprudence, that The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations were parts of a grand system. Nonetheless, TMS and WN are not tightly linked. This paper pursues the following strategy: knowing that Smith wrote both works, one can go back to westigate Smith's handling of the virtues, and see how that work implicitly defended the acquisitive, commercial society analyzed so thoroughly in WN. In doing so, it will be shown that Smith has a distinctive, key, narrow handling of the virtue justice which is based upon the passion resentment. Smith's treatment of justice explains why there can be no concept of just price in Smith's work. It serves to support market, flexible, or negotiated prices as ethically legitimate because it effectively removes market prices from the domain of government control or responsibility, at least insofar as government is enforcing justice.

1993 is an auspicious year for the History of Economics Society. Almost exactly twenty years and one month ago the first gathering of historians of economic thought took place in Chicago. It was not exactly the first meeting of the Society since it was officially formed only in 1974 and the first official meeting took place that year in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. However, the 1973 meeting demonstrated that there was sufficient interest in the subject to form a society. Hence, this is both the twentieth annual meeting of the History of Economics Society and the twentieth anniversary of its inception.

John Neville Keynes is best known for being the father of John Maynard Keynes and for writing The Scope and Method of Political Economy (1891). The lesser of these achievements was widely accepted as the definitive methodological tract in the field of political economy in the late-Victorian period. In this publication Keynes shed new light on many of the pressing methodological and epistemological problems of the day; he supplied the methodological underpinnings to Alfred Marshall's majestic synthesis of late-Victorian theoretical opinion, as articulated in his Principles of Economics (1890); and, whatis of paramount concern to me in this paper, he employed some deft rhetoric to hasten the end of the long and acrimonious methodological debate between the orthodox and historical economists that is now generally referred to as the English Methodenstreit or “battle of methods.” Keynes consciously strove to provide a solution to the “battle of methods” that would be acceptable to both the orthodox and historical economists and, for this reason, The Scope and Method is understandably characterized by a conciliatory tone and repeated, almost desperate, attempts to see value in arguments from both sides of the conceptual divide. Keynes nonetheless failed in his quest to be even-handed. He was a logician of the first order who was extremely impressed by the neat logical lines of the orthodox framework, and hence, for all his intellectual honesty and obvious good will, he could not help but interpret the debate through orthodox spectacles. The chief rhetorical ploy he drew upon to achieve this orthodox-leaning settlement between the principal antagonists was the unconscious one of the “passive-aggressive” in which the advocate repeatedly makes the outward motions of conceding ground while, in effect, conceding little. The specific mechanics of this strategy entailed reformulating each precept from the historicist conceptual framework so that it would not be in conflict with its nearest orthodox opposite (itself carefully reinterpreted by Keynes), either by showing that it was identical to this orthodox opposite or by arguing that different precepts were appropriate in different situations, and then dismissing the entire methodological debate—which was then in its third decade—as one long and lamentable misunderstanding. Keynes was ably assisted in executing this strategy by his Cambridge colleagues and, for this reason, the quest to settle the debate by providing orthodox interpretations of the precepts then at stake may be termed the “Cambridge solution.” Marshall and Henry Sidgwick played particularly important roles in carrying this rhetorical assault, as the former's more genuine sympathy for many of the historicist ideas and the latter's celebrated honesty made the Cambridge quest appear sincere.

One of the most significant statements in Joseph Schumpeter's discussion of Adam Smith in the History of Economic Analysis highlights the impact of scholastic thought upon Smith's economic analysis. Speaking of The Wealth of Nations, Schumpeter claimed that “the skeleton of Smith's analysis hails from the scholastics and natural-law philosophers” (Schumpeter 1954, p. 182). Though not the first to make this connection, Schumpeter's affirmation, alongside his treatment (ibid., part II, ch. 2) of the literature produced by these two groups, has been a stimulus to further exploration with respect to both the Protestant scholastics Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf and the medieval theologians (De Roover 1957; Bowley 1973). More recent studies which have followed in this vein have focused on the significance of the scholastic and natural law traditions for Smith's treatment of economic justice (Hont and Ignatieff 1983; Young and Gordon 1992).

The history of economics can be compared to a calm sea that once in a while happens to be shaken by heavy storms. This arises when works come out aimed at turning upside down the received interpretation of a great bygone economist's views. Professor Donald A. Walker's recent book, Walras's Market Models (1996), is likely to be among them. Its main thrust is that the view present-day economists have of Léon Walras is incorrect. The basic reason, he claims, is that to date all interpretations of Walras have been based on the last (posthumous) edition of the Eléments d' économie pure (henceforth the Elements), itself a slightly amended version of its fourth edition. To him this is a pity because Walras's most interesting theoretical ideas are to be found in its second and third editions—the embodiment of what he calls Walras's mature phase of theoretical activity—yet were abandoned by him when he revised his work for the fourth edition. The aim of Walker's book, then, is to bring to the fore the picture of what he considers to be the real Walras: an economist interested in the functioning of real-world markets and abiding by a realistic methodology who is attentive to the institutional set-up underlying his system of equations, and who is keen to provide his readers with disequilibrium models. In other words, Walker is trying to make the same claim apropos Walras as Axel Leijonhufvud (1968) did thirty years ago about Keynes when defending the view of a breach between the economics of Keynes and Keynesian economics. To Walker, modern Walrasian economics, or neo-Walrasian theory as it is more often called, is a betrayal of Walras's economics.

Although Cournot’s mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid-1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts, even before his “discovery” by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce, a sophisticated mathematician. Peirce provides a subtle interpretation and anticipates Bertrand’s criticisms.

John Dewey (1859-1952) is easily the most influential philosopher America has produced and Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) is arguably the most influential American heterodox economist. Although scholars have often pondered both their intellectual and personal relationship, until recently no firm conclusions could accurately be drawn. Due to the lack of correspondence between the two men and the brevity of Veblen's comments on and citations of Dewey, it is difficult to know what the former thought of the latter both in terms of personality and economic ideas. But, fortunately, Dewey cited Veblen and commented on his economic thought on many occasions so it is possible to at least partly reconstruct one-half of the relationship. This reconstruction will be the focus of this article, emphasizing: (1) their biographical intersections and convergences; (2) Dewey's ideas about economics and the economy; (3) Dewey's explicit use of Veblen's economic ideas in his own published work; and (4) Dewey's critical comments in his correspondence regarding Veblen's interpretation of pragmatism and his development as a social theorist.

Following the publication of The Logic of Collective Action by Mancur Olson in 1965, the notion of free riding gained wide currency in economics. The idea of enjoying the benefits of collective action without incurring the corresponding costs seemed to shed light on a number of major issues in American society at a time when social ills of various kinds prompted policy makers to reconsider the conditions of social cohesion. Gradually, free riding became to be regarded as the standard behavior of people placed in certain circumstances rather than the exception confirming the rule that people pay for what they get.

In this article, after reviewing the various meanings associated with the term free riding (and free rider), I follow the notion from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. I show that though it was used to tackle problems in fields as diverse as finance and labor—the study of which betrays the usual tensions between the free market and government intervention—from the mid-1960s, the notion increasingly conveyed a message about society as a whole. That an economic notion could serve such a purpose is another indication of the permeation of society by economic reasoning.

Adam Smith allegedly offers a model of economic development in both his Lectures on Jurisprudence and the Wealth of Nations—the so-called four stages of development model. The model presents a linear unfolding view of economic development from primitive to advanced stages. But Smith’s own historical examples systematically contradict this model. I thus question whether Adam Smith actually endorses and uses the four stages model of development to illustrate development and suggest that if he does, he does it to discredit it instead. For Smith, history teaches that development is more accidental than fitting deterministic models.

Since its publication in 1955, Almarin Phillips' article “The Tableau Économique as a Simple Leontief Model” has inspired an interesting line of interpretation of the arithmetical schemes presented two centuries earlier by François Quesnay. Subsequent attempts to represent the Tableaux économiques in the form of Input-Output transcriptions by Shlomo Maital (1972), Bernhard Korte (1972), Tibor Barna (1975), and Paul Samuelson (1986), among others, have underlined the brilliance of the French doctor's formal conception of the economy as a reproductive system.

W. Stanley Jevons's statistical study of periodicity has received much scrutiny (Aldrich 1987), but less attention has been given to his theoretical position on economic fluctuations, a circumstance which T. W. Hutchison justly finds surprising considering that “Jevons maintained that aggregate instability, and the distress it caused, presented profoundly serious problems, and devoted some of his most strenuous economic research to their explanation” (Hutchison 1988, p. 6). This paper takes up the challenge to examine the development of Jevons's thought on economic fluctuations from the early 1860s until his death in 1882.

Rod O'Donnell's (1999a, 1999b) and James Ahiakpor's (1999) contributions on the origin of the only diagram in J. M. Keynes's General Theory raise some interesting points regarding the use of documentary evidence for interpreting authors' ideas or specific passages in their writings.

Richard Cantillon is considered by many to be the first economic theorist. His contributions span such diverse topics as methodology, value and price theory, population, money, international trade, business cycles, the circular-flow model of the economy, and the price-specie-flow mechanism. His only known book, Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (hereafter, the Essai), may represent one of the single largest steps forward in the social sciences. Many attempts have been made to classify Richard Cantillon into a well-defined school of thought and he has been claimed as a forerunner by many schools of economic thought, but for purposes of categorization, he is most often placed with the mercantilists. Cantillon lived and wrote before the Physiocrats. He was involved in John Law's Mississippi Bubble, one of the grandest attempts to actualize the mercantilist dream of increasing the supply of money, and he was involved in the merchant trade and merchant banking business, so it would be natural to consider him a mercantilist writer. Those who have classified him as a mercantilist, however, base their categorization mainly on excerpts from the Essai where Cantillon seems to display sympathy with mercantilist policy objectives in such areas as international trade, monetary policy, and economic development.

In this article, I argue that Adam Smith’s system of perfect liberty contains some of the seeds of perfect competition, but that the modern perfectly competitive model differs from Smith’s perfect liberty in some important respects—in particular, the role of active competition among firms and the role of the entrepreneur. The article examines the analytical linkages between Smith’s system of liberty and three strands of modern economic theory—neoclassical perfect competition, contestable market theory and the Austrian analysis of market process.

In this article we analyze Edwin Walter Kemmerer’s contribution to the creation of the Federal Reserve System. Firstly, we contrast Kemmerer’s role in the transition from the Aldrich banking reform plan to the Glass–Owen plan with those of A. Piatt Andrew (who was Aldrich’s main advisor), H. Parker Willis (i.e., Carter Glass’s advisor), and J.L. Laughlin (who was Willis’ mentor). Secondly, we deal with theoretical questions posed by Kemmerer, who, as we assert, developed his own banking reform plan. Even if his proposals were not immediately taken into account in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, he contributes to the institutional structure of the Federal Reserve System.