In this paper, we show that Paul Samuelson (1915–2009), renowned as one of the main advocates of the mathematization of economics, has also contributed to the change of the place of visual representation in the discipline. In his early works (e.g. Foundations of Economic Analysis published in 1947), he rejected diagrammatic analysis as a relevant tool of theorizing but used diagrams extensively, both as a pedagogic tool in his introductory textbook Economics (1948) and as a way of clarifying his theory of public expenditure (1954-5). We show that Samuelson’s reluctance to use diagrams in his early works can be explained by his training at Chicago and Harvard and his rejecting Marshall’s economics, whereas his adoption of visual language in Economics was a product of the peculiar context affecting American mass-education after WWII. A methodological debate which opposed him to Kenneth Boulding in 1948 led him to reconsider the place of visual representation in order to clarify conceptual controversies during subsequent debates on mathematical economics. Therefore, it can be said that the prominent place of visual language in the diffusion of economic ideas was stabilized in the mid-1950s, as mathematical language became the prevailing tool of economic theorizing. From this, we conclude that the idea that algebra simply upstaged geometry in the making of economic analysis must be qualified.

Psychologist Harry Helson (1898–1977) developed Adaptation-Level (AL) theory during the 1930s to the 1970s, while economics was being refined through ordinalism and expected utility theory. This essay accounts for the process of transmission of AL theory from psychophysics to behavioral psychology and eventually economics. It explains how the concept of adaptation reflectance, originally intended to explain color vision, developed into an experimental approach that caught the attention of both psychologists and economists working on welfare analysis and behavioral research. It also argues that the history of AL theory—so far, absent from narratives about economics and psychology—is worth exploring in order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the two disciplines.

Don Patinkin (1922-95) was a co-author of the Keynesian neoclassical synthesis, and became engaged in several important controversies. One of them involved Milton Friedman's (1956) assertion about a supposed Chicago quantity theory “oral tradition.” From 1968 until his death, Patinkin hardly seemed to miss an opportunity of denigrating what he regarded as Friedman's “invention.” This controversy was taken to the 1970 American Economic Association (AEA) meeting by Harry Johnson (1971), and divided at least two economics departments, Chicago and the University of Western Ontario, where Patinkin and Johnson were frequent visitors, and where two influential monetarists, David Laidler and Michael Parkin, had migrated from Britain (Parkin, 1986; Patinkin, 1986).

In the period of the marginal revolution in England, utility was traditionally defined in reference to either desire or pleasure. William Stanley Jevons, for example, referred to pleasure. According to Jevons, utility was actually identical with the addition made to a person's happiness, that is to say to the sum of the pleasure created and the pain prevented (1871, pp. 5354). Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Marshall's spiritual father and mother, criticized this Benthamist perspective (Sidgwick 1883, p. 63) and introduced another definition at Cambridge. By utility of material things, Sidgwick stated, we mean their capacity tosatisfy men's needs and desires (1883, p. 84, emphasis added). Marshall, for his part, repeatedly moved from one meaning to another. In the first edition of his Principles of Economics, the term utility alternatively designated desire or pleasure. Few commentators have noted this double meaning of utility (Homan 1933, p. 224; Stigler 1950, p. 384; Guillebaud 1961, pp. 23637; Aldrich 1996, p. 211). Only Arthur Cecil Pigou (1903) and Jacob Viner (1925, p. 64749) have actually brought out its theoretical implications. No explanation as to the prevalence of this duality or its status in Marshall's welfare economics seems to have been proposed. Such is the intention of this article.

The paper discusses the work of Giacinto Dragonetti, a disciple of the Neapolitan Antonio Genovesi, founder of the Economia Civile tradition. Dragonetti’s short book, A Treatise on Virtues and Rewards, appeared in Naples in 1766, shortly after Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764). In the Treatise, Dragonetti advances a theory of action based on awards for virtues. The idea of awards relies on the hypothesis that good or virtuous citizens act for intrinsic reasons. Modern economics has followed the path of incentives (and “punishments”), not that of awards. The paper argues that Dragonetti’s contributions remain relevant not only for the history of economic thought, but for contemporary economic theory, as well.

David Colander argued to this Society two years ago that the term “neoclassical economics” ought to be declared dead (Colander 2000). I concur with him on the verdict, but do so for different reasons. Colander's argument was that neoclassicism possessed six primary attributes, and much of mainstream economics cannot be characterized in these terms. My argument is simpler. It is that neoclassical economics was primarily a theory of the human individual in economic life (albeit a flawed one), but contemporary mainstream economics does not possess a theory of the human individual. This conclusion may not surprise those who have reflected on the rise of formalism in economics in the postwar period. But for two reasons I think it important to emphasize the disappearance of a theory of the individual from economics. First, because neoclassicism implemented and defended for nearly a century one particular philosophical conception of the individual central to western thought since the Enlightenment, the abandonment of this commitment by mainstream economics is an important part of our understanding of its evolution and its relation to social thinking generally. Second, the demise of the individual in mainstream economics is also significant because, having abandoned the individual, mainstream economics is no longer capable of offering a defense of the individual in contemporary society. Indeed its project, I will suggest, is in important respects anti-individualist. It may be naïve on my part to think contemporary society still engaged in a defense of the individual. Nonetheless, I hold that thinking about the individual remains fundamental to how many people think about the social world, and that consequently mainstream economics' abandonment of the individual may render it historically irrelevant, perhaps contributing to its fragmentation and dissolution as an identifiable approach in economics. Thus the important conclusion to draw may not be Colander's: that we have seen the death of neoclassical economics. It may be that at issue today is the death of mainstream economics.

As we celebrate the centenary of John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability (1921), we are still faced with unresolved, fundamental questions about his foray into the philosophy of probability. One of these unresolved questions concerns whether Keynes (1931) later changed his mind in response to intense criticism from Frank Ramsey (1922, 1931) and abandoned the logical theory of probability. This essay draws from Cheryl Misak’s recent biography of Frank Ramsey (2020) to argue that Ramsey had an even wider influence on Keynes’s work than has been recognized, and that this influence was not just on his philosophy of probability but also on his economics. Understood in this fuller context, it seems even more clear that Keynes embraced and built upon Ramsey’s subjective theory of probability in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).

Irving Fisher is renowned as the pundit who declared in October 1929 that stock prices appeared to have reached a permanently high plateau and who, having amassed a net worth of ten million dollars in the boom of the 1920s, proceeded to lose eleven million dollars of that fortune in the crash, which, as John Kenneth Galbraith (1977, p. 192) remarked, “was a substantial sum, even for an economics professor.” Along with the Dow-Jones index, Fisher's reputation for understanding financial markets declined relative to that of Roger Babson, the stock forecaster, amateur economist, and founder of Babson College, who presciently predicted the stock market crash of autumn 1929 (and, with less prescience, the stock market crashes of 1926, 1927, and 1928, and the stock market recovery of 1930). An editorial in The Commercial and Financial Chronicle (November 9, 1929) declared of Fisher: “The learned professor is wrong as he usually is when he talks about the stock market” (quoted by Galbraith 1972, p. 151).

Environmentalism in the United States historically has been divided into its utilitarian and preservationist impulses, represented by Gifford Pinchot and John Muir, respectively. Pinchot advocated conservation of natural resources to be used for human purposes; Muir advocated protection from humans, for nature’s own sake. In the first half of the twentieth century, natural resource economics was firmly in Pinchot’s side of that schism. That position began to change as the postwar environmental movement gained momentum. In particular, John Krutilla, an economist at Resources for the Future, pushed economics to the point that it could embrace Muir’s vision as well as Pinchot’s. Krutilla argued that if humans preferred a preserved state to a developed one, then such preferences were every bit as “economic.” Either way, there were opportunity costs and an economic choice to be made.

It is well known that classical mechanics played a significant role in the thought of several major economists in the neoclassical tradition from the 1860s to the 1910s. Less well studied are the particular parts or features of mechanics that exercised this influence, or the depth and extent of the impact. After outlining the main traditions of mechanics and the calculus, and describing types of analogy between theories in general, I review some main pertinent features of the work of eight neoclassical economists from the 1830s to the 1910s. I argue that the influence took various forms but that in practice it was modest. Then I briefly describe a fresh set of possible influences with the development of dynamical systems in the period 1920–1950, where again the role of mechanics was limited. I end by raising a large question: does economics need some mathematics designed for its own purposes rather than that traditionally obtained by analogizing from mechanics and physics?

The appointment of Arthur Cecil Pigou as Alfred Marshall's successor has generated some interest among historians of economic thought (Coase 1972; Coats 1971; and Jones 1978). All agree that the 1908 election was highly political, affected by Marshall's intense efforts to manipulate the process in favor of Pigou and against Herbert S. Foxwell. T. W. Jones sheds light on “the lengths to which Marshall felt able to go in his support of Pigou and, in particular, the manner in which this impinged on one of the electors in 1908, J. N. Keynes” (Jones 1978, p. 235). This is interesting in the wake of John Neville Keynes's many conflicting roles: he was an elector, a friend of Foxwell, and father of John Maynard Keynes, who had failed to secure a Fellowship at King's College earlier that year. Regardless of the motives behind Marshall's maneuvers or the manner in which he accomplished his objective, the outcome of the election left Foxwell extremely, but understandably, disappointed and embittered. Some of this disappointment and bitterness must have been felt toward Marshall's successor, Pigou, of whom Foxwell did not think very highly to begin with. On different occasions, Foxwell had thought Pigou to be “an extreme agitator on a side not popular either here [Cambridge] or among influential people in the country”; “the last Economist I wish to see in any position where he could influence economic study. He has ruined it at Cambridge where complaints are incessant”; and “worse than useless”.

Emil Lederer (18821939) was exposed to diverse influences. In Vienna he was a student of Eugen von Bhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and Eugen von Philippovich, but when Hilferding and Otto Bauer spoke in those Viennese seminars Lederer must often have taken the side of the Marxists believe Jakob Marschak et al. (1941, p. 80). In Berlin, Lederer attended Gustav Schmoller's lectures. His supervisor in Munich, where he received a second doctoral degree, was Lujo Brentano. Lederer's habilitation submitted to the University of Heidelberg entailed the first comprehensive analysis of the working conditions and political attitudes of salaried employees (Dickler 1987, p. 157). As much as his last work, on the State of the Masses, published posthumously in 1940, it was an important contribution to sociology.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed (Kuhn, 1962a, p. 1).

Certain types of experimental findings serve as benchmarks, permanent facts about phenomena which any future theory must accommodate, and which in conjunction with comparable theoretical benchmarks, pretty permanently force us in one direction. … The remarkable fact about recent physical science is that it creates a new, collective, human artifact, by giving full range to three fundamental human interests, speculation, calculation, and experiment. By engaging in collaboration between the three, it enriches each in a way that would be impossible otherwise (Hacking, 1983, p. 248).

The paper explores why and how economists entered the courtrooms as expert witnesses in employment discrimination cases in the US. The main sources are published legal decisions. I analyze the courts’ and economists’ discourses on the use of a specific method: multiple regression analysis in relation to litigation history, academic debates, and the institutional settings of expertise within the courts. I first show how the early reception of the method in the late 1970s did not involve systematic rejection from the courts but rather a large amount of skepticism. I then illustrate how economic theory underlying the method was progressively introduced in the “judicial tool kit” and how the debates in the courtrooms relate to the debates in academia in the 1980s. By 1989, practical and ethical questions regarding the institutional settings of experts’ testimony took center stage, reflecting the increasing professionalization of forensic economics.

Each year, new economics Ph.D. students learn the proof of the existence of a competitive equilibrium as if it were a rite of passage. From the utility-maximizing behavior of consumers and the profit-maximizing behavior of firms, neophyte economists soon can demonstrate that under certain conditions there exists a competitive market-clearing general equilibrium price vector. While there are a number of proofs that establish the existence of such an equilibrium, the validity of these proofs is indubitable. Indeed, economists with even scant knowledge of the history of economics can identify Kenneth J. Arrow and Gerard Debreu's Econometrica paper as having provided the proof that settled the issue.

Over the years, Friedrich Hayek has received a generous response from some members of the British Conservative Party. One immediately thinks of endorsements of his work by Mrs. Thatcher in the 1970s and '80s.

Those with longer memories—and teeth—might also recall the controversy around Winston Churchill's first election broadcast in 1945, and the response to it by the Labour leader Clement Attlee, the following evening. Churchill spoke of the dangers of planning, and raised the idea that it would, in the end, require the powers of a Gestapo to put the ideal of a planned society into practice. Attlee criticized these ideas, and Hayek as the source of the theoretical conceptions behind them. This led to a fair bit of attention being paid to Hayek by the press, and to his being described as an economic adviser to Churchill. But Hayek himself has downplayed his direct contacts with Churchill (cf. Hayek 1994, pp. 106–107). Indeed, in Hayek on Hayek (Hayek 1994), Hayek indicates that he met Churchill only once. On that occasion he was struck by Churchill's being the worse for drink and then recovering, to Hayek's surprise, to make a first-rate speech.