Mandeville and Hume advance similar framings for their political economy, using emergentist and proto-sociological lines of analysis. They are less aligned with liberalism (political, economic, or metaphysical) than mercantilism, insofar as they favor balance-of-trade arguments and urbanization. They are both methodological holists, not individualists. It is the group, not individual agents, that figures at the core of their thought.

This article transcripts and analyzes two hitherto unpublished letters by David Ricardo. The first one (6 December 1812), was addressed to Leonard Horner. In the second one (3 March 1813), Ricardo thanked Samuel Tertius Galton for having sent him the pamphlet on monetary questions Galton had just published. This second letter was very useful to identify the work discussed by Ricardo in the first letter. Indeed, in his writing to Horner, Ricardo commented extensively on Galton’s manuscript. He dealt with important monetary issues such as the distinction between a deteriorated and a depreciated currency, the determination of the par of exchange between countries admitting two different monetary standards, and the distinction between an increased issue of notes by the Bank of England and an increased quantity of money in circulation.

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.

In an almost unreferenced article, Fitzhugh Carmichael (1928), writing of the period around the First World War, noted that “during the past twelve years many economic series have undergone what appears to be a permanent change in level.” These are prescient words that are widely applicable today. Carmichael noted that the then-standard practice of linear detrending was inappropriate in the presence of what we would now call “structural breaks”; as a result he proposed a method that would not only model a nonlinear trend, but would be suitable for situations where the transition from one regime to another was smooth. This study establishes the precedence of Carmichael’s ideas, re-examines his methods, and solves the problems that he thought would hinder wider applications of his approach, which has since become a central part of contemporary nonlinear econometric methods and for which Carmichael should be given credit.

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.

Research within the history of economic thought has focused only little on the development of economics under dictatorship. This paper attempts to show how a country with a relatively large and internationally established community of social scientists in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, was subjected to repression. We tell this story through the case of Isaak Il’ich Rubin, a prominent Russian economist and historian of economic thought, who in the late 1920s was denounced by rival scholars and repressed by the political system. By focusing not only on his life and work, but also on that of his opponents and institutional clashes, we show how the decline of a social science tradition in Russia and the USSR as well as the Stalinization of Soviet social sciences emerged as a process over time. We analyze the complex interplay of ideas, scholars, and their institutional context, and conclude that subsequent repression was arbitrary, suggesting that no clear survival or career strategy existed in the Stalinist system, due to a situation of fundamental uncertainty.

The paper uses the data from François Quesnay's writings to derive a social table for pre-revolutionary France and estimate the level and distribution of income. It formalizes Quesnay’s thinking about the process of production and situates it within the modern national accounting framework. Quesnay’s estimates are compared with some contemporary and recent estimates of eighteenth-century French incomes and inequality.

Generations of readers have nodded in agreement with Adam Smith’s argument, in Book One of the Wealth of Nations, that a nation cannot be happy if the workers who constitute the majority of its population are miserable. Smith notes that equity, besides, demands that workers receive a generous recompense for their labor. I contend that this famous statement is best interpreted in light of contemporary arguments that it was socially useful for workers to be poor. Smith’s engagement with these arguments is usually interpreted with reference to the labor supply function, but I argue that it also involved deeper suppositions about the place of workers in the social order. Smith’s reaction to these suppositions enriches our understanding of his contribution to liberal economics.

John Stuart Mill’s Fourth Fundamental Proposition Respecting Capital, first stated in 1848, had become an enigma well before the nineteenth century had come to an end. Never challenged in Mill’s own lifetime and described in 1876 as “the best test of a sound economist,” it has become a statement that not only fails to find others in agreement, but fails even to find an internally consistent interpretation that would make clear why Mill found it of such fundamental importance. Yet the fourth proposition should be easily understood as a continuation of the general glut debate. Economists led by Malthus had argued that demand deficiency was the cause of recession and a body of unproductive consumers was needed to raise the level of demand if everyone who wished to work was to find employment. Mill’s answer was that to buy goods and services would not increase employment, or, in Mill’s own words, “demand for commodities is not demand for labour.”

The paper discusses the interpretation of the Great Depression and the policy decision making by four Harvard economists: Lauchlin B. Currie, Jacob Viner, John H. Williams, and Harry D. White. All were eminent scholars in the field of monetary and international economics, and were deeply involved in policy decisions during the New Deal. We will discuss how their Harvard training provided them with a common methodological and analytical perspective, and how this common perspective translated into specific policies when they moved from the academia to public service in the US administration. Their interpretation of the causes of the Great Depression and their policy proposals show the eclectic approach that these four economists had to monetary, fiscal, and economic analysis, and the points of contact with both the US monetarist tradition and the work of John Maynard Keynes. At the same time, this very eclecticism, far from making them part of the monetarist or the Keynesian schools, characterized them as a group of their own: a network of scholars who, by virtue of their studies and the evolution of their professional careers, developed a style of analysis and policy prescriptions that deeply influenced the nature of the New Deal.

Scholarship on the American Slave South generally agrees that John Eliot Cairnes’s The Slave Power provided a highly biased interpretation of the functioning and long-term viability of the southern slave economy. Published shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, its partisanship is partly attributed to its clearly stated goal to shift British support from the secession states to the states of the Union. Thus, it is generally agreed, Cairnes sifted his sources to obtain the desired outcome. A more balanced use of the sources at his possession would have provided a very different outcome. This paper will challenge this general assessment of Cairnes’s book by examining in some detail two of Cairnes’s most important sources: Frederic Law Olmsted’s travelogues on the American Slave South and James D. B. De Bow's compilation of statistical data and essays in his Industrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States (1852–53). By contrasting De Bow's use of statistical evidence with Olmsted's travelogues, my final purpose is to question the weight of evidence on the American Slave South. Cairnes aimed, I will argue, much more to balance the evidence than is generally acknowledged, but it is misleading to think that balancing a wide range of evidence washes out bias if this evidence itself is politically skewed, as is the rule rather than the exception.

In his attempt to improve Carl Menger’s economics, Friedrich von Wieser frequently discussed methodological issues. This paper proposes that Wieser’s epistemological position can be understood as the result of a reformulation of the empirical position that Menger (1871) developed in his Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre. This paper proposes four ways of interpreting Wieser’s concept of “experience”: i) experience stored in language, ii) experience as introspection, iii) experience as a mental experiment, and iv) experience as observation. Because Wieser applied the concept of “motivational power” derived from psychological induction in order to explain observable social phenomena, this paper calls his position “methodological motivationalism.” This particular position can help explain his later shift to sociological studies.

While federal financial rescues have become a common response to crises, the federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. One man, Eugene Meyer, is largely responsible for the origin of federal financial rescues, through both the War Finance Corporation and Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Meyer learned laissez-faire economics from William Graham Sumner at Yale. However, German economist Adolph Wagner’s state-socialism philosophy heavily influenced Meyer’s thinking, and Meyer developed an interventionist philosophy. Serving in key government positions, Meyer put his beliefs into practice. These channels of influence and the resulting policies are examined.

Richard Jones’s 1831 critique of David Ricardo’s theory of rent is generally viewed as ill-founded. The present paper shows that Jones’s Essay on the Distribution of Wealth contains an important analytical insight: Jones noticed that Ricardo’s treatment of agricultural improvements was seriously incomplete, because it failed to accommodate the historically important case of agricultural improvements that involve the use of fixed capital. More generally, it is suggested that Jones was correct in pointing out that Ricardo had not properly taken into account fixed capital in his analysis of rent and of agricultural improvements.

From 1816 through to the end of the Civil War, the colonization of emancipated slaves in Africa and the American tropics occupied a prominent place in federal policy discussions. Although colonization has traditionally been interpreted as an aberration in anti-slavery thought on account of its dubious racial legacy and discounted for its impracticality, its political persistence remains a challenge for historians of the antebellum era. This article offers an explanation by identifying a distinctive economic strain of colonization in the moderate anti-slavery advocacy of Mathew Carey, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln. From the nullification crisis until the Civil War, adherents of this strain effectively integrated colonization into the American System of political economy. Their efforts were undertaken to both reconcile their respective anti-slavery views with a raw-material-dependent domestic industrialization program, and to adapt American System insights to an intended program of gradual, compensated emancipation.

Economic analyses of American Civil War causation typically focus on longue durée structural arguments neglecting specific context and contemporary observers’ predictions about disunion’s effects. This article suggests secession heightened concern about government solvency and intensified a conversation about the nature of American inter- and intra-national trade, one hinging on ideas about relative dependence and positioning within the world economy. Deep South secessionists rested their claims on a cotton-centric economic worldview, trusting that their coveted commodity could finance independence and attract foreign partners. Pro-compromise northerners greatly feared that possibility. Less compromising Republican political economists countered that secession would reveal northern economic superiority and the South’s underlying weakness, eventually leading to voluntary reunion. Though competing sides envisioned peaceful pathways towards their ends, the actions of insolvent central governments—who feared that any compromise on contested forts and revenue ports would undermine the confidence of underwriters—militated against these imagined peaceful ends.

Paolo Sylos Labini’s Oligopoly Theory and Technical Progress (1957) is considered one of the major contributions to entry-prevention models, especially after Franco Modigliani’s formalization. Nonetheless, Modigliani neglected Sylos Labini’s aim when reviewing his work (1958), particularly his demonstration of the dynamic relation between industrial concentration and economic development. Modigliani addressed only Sylos Labini’s microeconomic analysis and the determination of the long-run equilibrium price and output, concentrating on the role played by firms’ anticipations. By doing so he shifted attention from Sylos Labini’s objective analysis to a subjective approach to the oligopoly problem. This paper discusses Sylos Labini’s and Modigliani’s differing approaches, derives the origin of the Sylos postulate, and sets Modigliani’s interpretation of Sylos Labini’s oligopoly theory in the context of his 1950s research into firms’ behavior under uncertainty.

Before the publication of Ronald Coase’s “The Nature of the Firm,” new developments in the theory of the firm were under way in the works of Arnold Plant at the LSE, and Dennis Robertson, Frederick Lavington, and Austin Robinson among the Cambridge Marshallians. Although in disagreement on industrial policy, these economists shared the belief that the common view that bigger firms are always more efficient—a very popular view within the movement for industrial ‘rationalization’—was untenable from a theoretical point of view. In the works of these economists the ‘make or buy’ scheme is sometimes employed, and Coase’s idea of a cost for using the market can be found, in implicit form, in some writings of Plant that appeared before Coase’s article. But the fundamental principle that we now call “transaction costs” was hardly of any help to any of those who, at Cambridge as well as at the LSE, were insisting on the costs of coordination as a limit to the growth of the firm.