“I have not the least doubt of it for you have made it of bread and butter instead of tea,” said Mr. Damer when Adam Smith, whom he was visiting that morning, declared “it was the worst tea he had ever met with” (Rae 1895, p. 238). The year 2023 marks the 300th anniversary of Smith, this absent-minded and introverted thinker, who enjoyed long solitary walks by the seaside more than anything else, was a fervent admirer of Voltaire, and became a familiar figure for those who saw him walk every morning to work at the Custom House in Edinburgh, absorbed in conversation with himself “with a bunch of flowers in his left hand, and his cane, held by the middle, borne on his right shoulder” (Rae 1895, pp. 329–330). A loyal friend and poor correspondent, Smith left an indelible mark during his life as a remarkable thinker and author of renowned books, which would, as Adam Ferguson wrote to him in April 1776, “form the opinions, and I hope to govern at least the coming generations” (Smith 1987, hereinafter Corr., p. 193).

I wrote this address during the first weeks of the murderous and devastating invasion of Russia in Ukraine, in a fluctuating mood of anger and sadness. My aim was addressing the issue of the use of history to legitimize ideology, and I was contemplating how I could convince you of the urgency of this issue, and then this war broke out.

This paper proposes a genealogy of the concept of homo œconomicus as it emerged from the methodological debate on the economic agent of political economy. If John Stuart Mill gave birth to the economic man in his 1836 essay “On the Definition of Political Economy,” he certainly did not baptize him. The expression was introduced by Francis A. Walker after Mill passed away in the 1870s. Economic man acquired its Latin name of homo œconomicus under the pen of French Catholic economist Claudio Jannet in 1878. Yet, only at the end of the century did Maffeo Pantaleoni (1889) proudly reclaim homo œconomicus as a building block of pure economics. In reaction to the evolutionary hedonism of Pantaleoni, Vilfredo Pareto then cleansed the concept of homo œconomicus and realized the Millian project of an abstract science based on an economic agent.

The abolition of slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a long process. In terms of the economic views of abolitionists, there has been an excessive focus on the economic ideas of liberal abolitionists and their approach to “Civilization, Christianity, and Commerce.” However, there was a “developmental abolitionism” that has received little attention. Afro-American Martin R. Delany and Liberian James S. Payne were writers who approached abolitionism through this developmentalism. They favored more interventionist measures aimed at building the material power and national autonomy of Black nations to undercut the power of slave-using African chiefs, to provide indigenous Africans with employment, and to undermine the profitability of slave-based cotton production in the Americas. They also implicitly and indirectly approached labor scarcity with solutions ranging from promoting labor-saving technology to cultivating national prosperity that would improve emigration to Africa or increase birth rates.

Commitment to the behaviorist approach to utility theory, to the usefulness of mathematics in economic analysis, and to equalization of the marginal utility of income as a principle of just taxation brought Irving Fisher and Ragnar Frisch to attempt to measure the marginal utility of income and led them to collaborate in forming the Econometric Society and sponsoring the establishment of the Cowles Commission, institutions advancing economic theory in connection to mathematics and statistics, and led Frisch to pioneer an axiomatic approach to utility and microeconomic theory.

Quantitative techniques have received increasing attention in the history and methodology of economics. Nonetheless, a “text as data” approach has mostly been overlooked and its applicability to the history of economics remains to be examined. To understand what we gain from such quantitative techniques in relation to existing historical analyses, we apply some “text as data” techniques to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. We explore the books’ topics, styles, and sentiments. We show how word frequency analysis can be used to examine the differences between the books, shed light on conceptual discussions, and reveal an important stylistic aspect, specifically Smith’s use of personal pronouns. Style analysis shows the similarities and differences in terms of lexical richness and readability between the two books. We also show the limitations of a third technique, sentiment analysis, when applied to historical economic texts.

In his recent paper in this journal, Bradley Bateman (2021) breaks with the “standard view” of Frank Ramsey’s influence on Jahn Maynard Keynes and argues that Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophical thought underpinned both Keynes’s acceptance of Ramsey’s subjective theory of probability and Keynes’s adoption of a narrative theory of the role of confidence in economic fluctuations in the General Theory. In this paper it is argued that Bateman is right both in emphasizing the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy on Keynes’s thought during the development of the General Theory and afterwards and in arguing that the influence of Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy partly explains Keynes’s emphasis on the importance of the state of confidence in Chapter 12 of the General Theory. However, it is argued that Ramsey’s pragmatist philosophy had a much greater influence on Keynes than acknowledged by Bateman. Furthermore, contra Bateman, Keynes’s move to a more pragmatist philosophical position does not imply that Keynes accepted Ramsey’s subjective theory of (measurable) probability.

The works of Adam Smith are filled with quotable moments. The pin factory. The poor man’s son. The invisible hand. The butcher, the brewer, and the baker. The dog and the philosopher. The impartial spectator. The man of system and his chessboard. And our propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. All of these are so well known and so often quoted that I’ve had editors ask me just to refer to them in passing rather than quoting them in full.

This comment makes a response to one of several points made in Bill Gerrrard’s (2023) criticisms of Bateman (2021) in particular, this comment clarifies Keynes’s use of mathematical expectation in The General Theory (1936).

Luigi Einaudi was an authoritative Italian economist and a leading representative of economic and political liberalism in Europe. After the Second World War, he became governor of the Bank of Italy and president of the Italian Republic. This paper analyzes his role as opinion maker from the end of the nineteenth century until the 1920s, when he was a leading columnist at La Stampa and the Corriere della Sera, the most influential newspapers in Italy at that time. It focuses on the scope and limits of Einaudi’s efforts to broaden consensus in Italian public opinion on the principles of economic liberalism and free competition. To this end, it investigates Einaudi’s journalistic style, his views on the role of the newspapers, and his large following among the public. Further sections analyze the main issues tackled by Einaudi in his articles in the Corriere and the systematic work of propaganda he enacted during World War I to convince the Italian households to reduce consumption and to finance the military expenditure. A final section deals with the “reconstruction program” devised by Einaudi in the early 1920s with the aim of restoring price stability and fiscal restraint, his efforts in the Corriere to propagate this program, and his forced retreat from journalism after the beginning of the fascist regime in 1924–25.

This study addresses the incompatibility question between the corporate organization of industry and a system based on the general recognition of economic rights and freedoms in continental western Europe. A dissociation/identification model based on a comparative analysis verifies the consistency of the premise that makes the emergence of economic rights possible only after suppressing the corporations of trades. The model stems coherently from the ideas of eighteenth-century political economists and crystallizes in reform policies aimed at eliminating corporate elements contrary to economic freedoms. The results directly link the intellectual model and the actual expressions of economic rights within the declarations written at the end of the old regime. While dissociation creates an opportunity for corporate continuity within a framework of recognized economic freedoms, the French identification model implies the suppression of corporations.

“Prose is the Stile in which all the common affairs of Life, all Business and Agreements are made. No one ever made a Bargain in verse.”

LRBL ii.115–116

Arthur Pigou’s welfare treatises are exercises in practical ethics. The exercises were founded on the ethical concepts of good and economic welfare with the economist’s national dividend providing the practical instrument for solving economic problems. This paper follows this triad from its origins in Pigou’s earliest writings on ethics and economic policy, into the welfare treatises, and onto his last writings—a period of around fifty years.

This study deals with the debate that took place among Italian economists and statisticians at the turn of the twentieth century on the economic effects of mass emigration. In particular, it is focused on a controversy between Vilfredo Pareto and Alberto Beneduce on the one side, and Francesco Coletti on the other. It analyzes the way these scholars struggled with: (i) the problem of properly elaborating a specific cost-benefit analysis regarding emigration; and (ii), as a consequence, the problem of recognizing a clear set of economic policies designed to manage the complex economic and social processes connected to emigration. The paper demonstrates the enduring character of the problems encountered in the early Italian debates by showing that these questions are similar to those debated in the vast literature developed from the 1950s on the subject of brain drain, and suggests an explanation for the lack of conclusive results in this literature. We think that it is possible to understand this impasse by highlighting that in the analyzed literature, a problem of “fallacy of composition” emerges between the microeconomics and macroeconomics of emigration.

The 1929 stock market crash on Wall Street is one of the most spectacular economic events of all times. In Sweden, leading economists got involved in a lively debate on the events on Wall Street before, during, and after the crash. Three of them were particularly active. Gustav Cassel and Bertil Ohlin were not overly worried since they regarded the stock market mania and the panic as phenomena more or less disconnected from the rest of the economy. Their theoretical argument was that booms and busts upon a stock market cannot create or destroy capital or purchasing power. Johan Åkerman, on the contrary, warned repeatedly that a serious stock market crash was in the making and, once it had happened, that it would in many ways affect the entire economy.

“We need not be surprised … that the Cartesian philosophy …, though it does not perhaps contain a word of truth, … should nevertheless have been so universally received by all the Learned in Europe at that time. … [They] greedily receive[d] a work which we justly esteem one of the most entertaining Romances that has ever been wrote.”

LRBL ii.134

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 paper focuses on the intellectual path through which Raúl Prebisch placed industrialization at the center of his economic thought and policy recommendations. It shows how the changing international context of the 1930s and 1940s made him depart from laissez-faire and adopt countercyclical policies, gradually abandoning the agrarian export-led growth model and finally embracing industrialization as the new growth strategy for Argentina and Latin America.

The heated debates that Bernard Mandeville’s work inspired in Britain, France, and Germany are well-documented. No such account is available for the public reception of his ideas in his country of birth, the Dutch Republic. This paper seeks to fill that void. Remarkably, his ideas did not cause much of a stir. Consequently, the paper explains the divergent pattern of response from the Dutch. It is argued that his ideas were either reverting to disputes that had already been settled or were out of touch with the general climate of opinion in the Netherlands.

It is a difficult task to narrow down a favorite passage from a body of work as rich as that of Adam Smith. One of the things that has always amused me about Smith is his use of Scottish examples to make universal points. In one of these he launches himself into the long-running rivalry between Scotland’s two major cities: Edinburgh and Glasgow. Smith lived for a time in both cities and worked on what would become the Wealth of Nations in what were then, as now, two very different cities. In The Wealth of Nations he makes use of this to develop a classic example of Smithian social theory.