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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The paper offers the first interpretation of David Ricardo’s famous numerical example fully compatible with the primary source. It claims that the sole purpose of the four numbers was to illustrate that the relative value of commodities made in different countries is not determined by the respective quantities of labor devoted to their production. This exception results from unequal ordinary profit rates between countries because capital does not move across national borders as easily as it does within the same country. Likewise, the paper also debunks some entrenched myths about the numerical example. It shows that Ricardo did not leave the terms of trade indeterminate, that the purpose of the four numbers was not about measuring the gains from trade, and that Portugal had no productivity advantage over England. All of this contradicts the way scholars have interpreted Ricardo’s numerical example since the mid-nineteenth century.

Historians of economic thought have carried out detailed studies of classical and marginalist approaches to value based on production cost and utility, respectively, not to mention about the fusion of both interpretations by the neoclassical school. This is not the case with rareness value, a theory commonly attributed to Léon Walras, although Aristotle surely had rareness in mind when he first attempted to explain chrematistics. This article focuses on how our understanding of rareness has evolved from the earliest economic formulations to those of Auguste and Léon Walras, contesting Murray Rothbard’s thesis that there is only one way in which the transmission of the utility theory of value can be tracked from scholasticism to the Austrian school. On the contrary, the concept of rareness continued to figure in some theories of value of the French Enlightenment, especially those that emerged within Calvinist circles, and was recovered in times of reaction against the dominant classicism.

The aim of this article is to make an overall assessment of Andreas George Papandreou’s theoretical contributions during his American academic career, from the perspective of the history of economic thought. Papandreou contributed to the postwar development of economic thought in competition theory and experimental testing of consumer theory. In developing competition theory, he introduced a new method of evaluating the monopolistic power of a firm through a coefficient measuring the firm’s penetration in the market. Furthermore, he suggested a way of experimentally testing whether individual preferences satisfy the axiom of transitivity. He actively participated in the methodological controversies on the realisticness of economic assumptions that took place between 1946 and 1953, and on the empirical meaning of economics in 1963, between Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, Fritz Machlup, Herbert Simon, and others.

In his article published in JHET in 2022, Vincent Carret (2022a) criticizes our work. In footnote 19, pages 630–631, he claims that our result “is based on a mistaken interpretation of the paragraph at the bottom of p. 191 of Frisch (1933).” He then states that we “take to mean that the coefficient of each cycle in the general sum of solutions is arbitrary, while … these coefficients [depended] on initial conditions and the parameters of the system.” The present rejoinder aims at rebutting Carret’s allegation of mistaken interpretation in our work. We demonstrate that his statements are based on a misunderstanding of Frisch’s econometric model and approach. Then, we show that Carret’s results are not supported by the demonstration he claims to have made, and that he misrepresents our arguments.

In this letter to the editors of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, I present my results on Ragnar Frisch’s rocking horse model, published in an earlier issue of the same journal, and detail why the comments by Jean-Marc Ginoux and Franck Jovanovic on my paper have no grounding. I explain the role of initial conditions on the amplitude of cycles and trend in Frisch’s solution, and emphasize that my contribution was to show that Frisch built a model where cycles and growth came from the same economic mechanism.