Renewed interest has been kindled in the status and “meaning” of William T. Thornton (1813–1880) in the history of economic thought. Thornton is often credited, rightly or wrongly, with re-orienting J. S. Mill's thought on the wages fund—a critical cornerstone of classical economics. While Thornton's actual influence on Mill in this matter

Being the President of a society such as this is a position that brings with it relatively few benefits. One very definite benefit it does confer, however, is the opportunity to address one's peers on a subject of one's choice, for an indefinite period of time, and with no fear of contradiction; no referees, no discussants, and not even any questions from the audience. I intend to make use of this unconstrained state by being somewhat more speculative in my remarks than I could otherwise be.

I was born in Windsor, Ontario on 25 May 1943, the first child of William Robert Moggridge and Doris Livingston Moggridge. The surname Moggridge comes from Celtic Devon. Add in Livingston and my maternal grandmother's Lennox, the Celtic tinge gets stronger. The Hulls on my paternal grandmother's side reduce it, but there were Camerons in that gene pool. Both of my parents were University of Toronto graduates: my father in Metallurgical Engineering (1934) and my mother in Honours Philosophy and English (1933) and Library Science (1934).

Historians of economic thought typically have seen little or no connection between William Stanley Jevons's economic theory and policy issues. Wesley C. Mitchell, for example, suggested that Jevons had little interest in politics and was uncertain on the questions of the day. He was “basically interested in the subject [of economics] as a science and not as a means of bettering economic organization” (Mitchell 1969, pp. 31, 101-2). Mitchell's comments are curious in view of Jevons's extensive writings on public issues. His book, The State in Relation to Labour (1882), is considered a classic on the subject of policy and a rationalization for interventionist government. Jevons's pronouncement that “we can lay down no hard and fast rules, but must treat every case upon its merits” may well have marked the end of the “liberal era of principles,” according to F. A. Hayek (Hutchison 1978, pp. 100-101). Certainly Jevons intended as much.

Statistical inferences have long been part of economic inquiry. But how were such inferences made and what logic was employed for them, in particular before the procedures called econometrics were developed? This question is raised in the present paper in relation to the discovery of gold in California in 1848 and in Australia in 1851. Different opinions were soon advanced on whether prices had risen as a result, and statistical inferences were often part of the arguments. I examine the arguments of three economists, William Newmarch (1820–82), John E. Cairnes (1823–75) and W. Stanley Jevons (1835–82), who all wrote about the gold question on several occasions.

John Richard Hicks is famous for the contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare economics that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1972 and for his interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory (1936). Hicks made these pathbreaking contributions to economic modeling in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Following Axel Leijonhufvud's classification (1984, p. 28), these are the works of “Hicks the Younger.” “Hicks the Elder” formulated “Some Questions of Time in Economics” (Hicks 1976). There he refers to theories that adequately incorporate aspects of time as “economic theory in time” in contrast to “economic theory out of time.” Hicks argues that for the theory of capital and the theory of markets this distinction is of greatest importance (ibid., p. 139).

Albert Aftalion is certainly one of the best known French economists of the first half of the twentieth century. The influence he exerted during his lifetime over the scientific community of his homeland was considerable, and he was promptly acknowledged abroad to be one of the leading theorists of the business cycle. While he is best known as one of the inventors of the acceleration principle (Haberler 1937), we will focus on Aftalion's endogenous explanation of non-monetary business cycles and, more specifically, on the theoretical framework supporting Les crises périodiques de surproduction. Though this work can be seen as a mere “(desperate) attempt” to reconcile the law of markets with general overproduction (Abraham-Frois 1987), we argue instead that Aftalion's failure to construct an equilibrium theory of aggregate overproduction can be traced back to his inadequate treatment of aggregate demand. According to him, long roundabout processes are what generate cyclical fluctuations within a setting in which commodities produced and brought to the market always find an outlet. In other words, the law of markets implies market clearing where declines in prices instead of involuntary stock-building occur in the event of a crisis. How demand behaves in such a setting requires careful specification, which is precisely what is lacking in Aftalion's model.

The equation of exchange is identified with the name Irving Fisher. Although it is not the quantity theory, a point often made by him, it is the core organizing ingredient for his subsequent quantity theoretic analyses. It has in fact been argued that the quantity theory was central to Fisher's work, that “his fundamental premise and basis for all other analysis and policy prescription was this: money matters and matters most, [that he indeed was] the first of the modern ‘monetarists’” (Allen 1977, p. 563).

Modern Austrian economists employ the Austrian Theory of Capital as an analytical construct with which to interpret policy-induced business cycles and suggest an appropriate remedy. The argument is that the structure of production, particularly the degree of capital intensity or “length of the production period” among different sectors of a non-collectivized economy, depends on the level of interest rates. Low interest rates encourage greater capital intensity in production while high interest rates reduce the degree of capital intensity or roundaboutness. Thus a greater capital intensity encouraged by an artificially low rate of interest created by a central bank's credit inflation must be followed by increased unemployment of labor when interest rates rise again to reflect the ensuing price inflation and the credit inflation stops. Restraint on central bank credit creation is thus prescribed as the remedy for fluctuations in output and employment in the business cycle.

The British public debt grew to unprecedented levels during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, and the debt service burden, aggravated by deflation, was reaching alarming heights in the postwar period, absorbing over half of all tax revenue. David Ricardo was prompted by economic analysis and existing circumstances to advocate the rapid redemption of existing public debt by means of a “capital levy,” a one-time tax on the nation's property. In print, he advocated the proposal in “The Funding System,” an entry in a supplementary volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica published in 1820, in which he wrote that “by one great effort, we should get rid of one of the most terrible scourges which was ever invented to afflict a nation” (Ricardo 1951–73, IV, p. 197).

The idea of value-free economics is an old methodological issue. It has given rise to one of the most important controversies in the history of economic thought. The discussion was important because it had to do with the scientific nature of economics. One can still find a significant number of methodological works (e.g. Coddington 1972, Gordon 1977, Samuels 1977, Sugden 1981, Colander 1994) which echo this old controversy. Most economists today, though, would agree that the claim of an economic theory free from values is essential in establishing the scientific nature of the discipline. A positive, value-free economics, in the sense of not relying on any particular set of value judgments or on any philosophical or psychological framework, is generally seen as the ideal. This approach has crucially influenced important branches of economics such as microeconomic theory. The current established position was a product of a historical process which played a significant role in the formation of the body of economic theory. Furthermore, the idea of what is value-free economics has changed since its first introduction as a scientific ideal. The nature of this change is also important for understanding the present conception of the scientific character of economics.

The importance of Thomas Robert Malthus's ratios has long been acknowledged. Combined with his use of population figures from America, they gave his first Essay on the Principle of Population the appearance of a scientific study backed by empirical evidence. Prominent economists such as David Ricardo, Nassau Senior, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, and Joseph A. Schumpeter credited the Essay with being a major work of science. Many scholars have claimed that the trappings of science contributed significantly to the persuasiveness of Malthus's view to his intended readers, who believed that human nature operated according to strict mechanical laws (Rashid 1987, p. 22).

Between 1873 and 1875 two anonymous pamphlets were published in London with intriguingly similar titles. They were: (A) A Few Remarks upon Certain Practical Questions of Political Economy, 1873; 2d ed., 1873; 3d ed., 1874; and (B) A Few Remarks on Professor Cairnes' Recent Contribution to Political Economy, 1875. Both were published by Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., Stationers' Hall Court, and both carried on their title pages the statement “By a Former Member of the Political Economy Club.” The identity of the author or authors has not hitherto been established, but it now appears that John Cazenove (1788-1879) was certainly the author of (A), and most probably the author of (B).

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.

The conventional wisdom in economics holds, with Irving Fisher, that interest is explained jointly by the forces of time preference (thrift) and productivity. One school of thought, however, has held stubbornly to the assertion that interest is best understood as a result of time preference alone, time preference as the essential determinant of interest. This is the pure time preference approach to interest. And while most economists are inclined to dismiss this approach out of hand, the pure time preference approach has proved remarkably resilient. Part of the explanation for the persistence of rival theories can be found, not surprisingly, in terminological confusions and ambiguities, for example in deciding among candidates for essential causation. I hope in this article to improve the case for the pure time preference approach to interest by clarifying the argument. It appears that some of the confusion can be attributed to the approach of two theorists, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and to their connecting the time preference approach to their particular a priori methodology.