This paper investigates the teaching of Walrasian general equilibrium theory in the early twentieth century through an analysis of three treatises: Arthur Bowley’s The Mathematical Groundwork of Economics (1924), Gustav Cassel’s The Theory of Social Economy (1924), and Étienne Antonelli’s Principes d’économie pure (1914). Despite their original contributions, the three works were also intended to be read by students. Examining these treatises contributes to a historical understanding of pre-war economics education literature and sheds light on the evolution of mathematical economics, particularly within the context of the educational process. The paper concludes that while all three treatises presented Léon Walras’s general equilibrium framework, they simultaneously reflected diverse fundamental beliefs about economic science, such as its objective and scope. Notably, there was no singular dominant group appropriating Walras’s model. However, a content analysis revealed structural similarities among the treatises.

This paper examines the household economics of Tomoko Matsudaira, a Japanese female economist, with a specific focus on the issue of wise consumption within Matsudaira’s expenditure theory. The exploration includes Matsudaira’s definition and criteria for wise consumption, her perspectives on consumer cooperatives guiding wise consumption within the household, her views on the influence of the consumer environment outside the household, and consumer awareness of wise consumption. This paper is the first ever investigation of Matsudaira’s views on wise consumption in English, and it primarily relies on Matsudaira’s debut work, Household Economics (1925a), but also references her later works to discern whether Matsudaira’s perspectives on wise consumption changed or developed over her more than forty years of research in household economics. This paper aims to provide theoretical insights into wise consumption by exploring Matsudaira’s discussions on household economics.

During his life, Friedrich Hayek drastically changed his evaluation of Aristotle’s role in the history of political and economic thought. Initially considering Aristotle as one of the forerunners of the liberal tradition, he then came to consider Aristotle’s philosophy as the source of collectivist thought. By examining both published and unpublished materials, this article shows that Hayek’s attack on Aristotle in The Fatal Conceit is authentic and puts Hayek’s affirmations on Aristotle in the context of his intellectual development. Hayek’s rejection of Aristotle can be related to his increasing emphasis on the abstract nature of the rules governing complex phenomena. However, this does not explain why Hayek felt compelled to take such a stance on an ancient philosopher who was highly esteemed in the school he belonged to. Hayek’s abandonment of the established view on the Aristotelian roots of the Austrian school can be better understood by considering the intellectual environment of his time. His eventual adoption of Karl Popper’s point of view on Aristotle meant taking a stance against Karl Polanyi’s democratic socialism and distancing himself from Wilhelm Röpke’s Catholic conservatism.

By exploring Adam Smith’s considerations of arts, this paper stresses that the philosopher establishes a profound connection between music and sympathy. In his essay “Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called The Imitative Arts,” Smith delves into esthetic theory, dedicating a significant portion of the text to music and its role in eliciting pleasure and emotions. While previous studies have acknowledged the presence of art-related vocabulary and an esthetic dimension in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, they have not comprehensively mobilized his art essay to illuminate his moral theory. Following this unexplored path, this paper rallies the parallel Smith creates between emotions and musical aspects, such as rhythm and melody, to find a connection between his esthetic and moral ideas. In essence, it reveals how the human esthetic sensibility to look for regularities and order serves as a foundational element in Smith’s understanding of sympathy and social harmony.

This paper examines the writings of socialist scholars who played a pivotal role in shaping Friedrich Hayek’s perspective in The Road to Serfdom, including William Beveridge, Stuart Chase, Henry Dickinson, Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Oskar Lange, Harold Laski, Abba Lerner, Barbara Wootton, and the contributing authors in Findlay MacKenzie’s Planned Society (1937). Many of these socialist thinkers held two main hypotheses. First, industrial concentration was inevitable under capitalism. Second, they argued, government ownership or control of key economic sectors was necessary to protect democracy from industrial consolidation in the capitalist system and to reduce political opposition to complete state ownership or control over the means of production. Despite sharing Hayek’s concern for socialism’s potential erosion of democratic freedoms, these socialist hypotheses have received much less scholarly attention than Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. We conclude that Hayek formalized socialist scholars’ fears and developed a well-defined hypothesis that central planning could threaten democratic freedoms.

The origin of modern financial economics can be traced to early discounted expected value solutions for the price of life annuities. In contrast to the single life annuity valuations attributed to Jan de Witt and Edmond Halley, the computational complexity of joint life annuity valuation posed difficulties. Following a brief review of various joint life annuity specifications, a history of joint life annuity issuance and valuation in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries is provided. With this background, the 1671 correspondence from de Witt to Jan Hudde on possible methods for valuing joint life annuities is detailed. These methods are contrasted with the geometric method described in Halley (1693), providing impetus for examination of the analytical approximations developed by Abraham de Moivre and Thomas Simpson.

This article traces the evolution of Sidney Weintraub’s Post-Keynesian identity during the four decades following WW II, as seen through the eyes of his son E. Roy Weintraub. I explore Roy’s notion that Sidney’s career can be seen as the result of defense mechanisms associated with those of a borderline personality, such as splitting and projection. As Sidney transformed from an aspiring mainstream macroeconomist into a reclusive warrior for ideas, developing a polarized view of the economics profession, his work eventually became subsumed as a branch of Post-Keynesian economics. At the same time, he nudged his son into a symbiotic dependency, standing in for his career as a mathematical economist and coauthor, while also being made complicit in his adultery. Roy’s eventual distancing from this role ultimately led to a rupture prior to Sidney’s death in 1983. It was only then that Roy was able to establish a scholarly profile as a historian of economics and gain the understanding of his father that informs this text.

Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Nutter was the acting chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the interagency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for his own work on the Soviet Union.

According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.

Carl Snyder was one of the most prominent US monetary economists of the 1920s and 1930s. His pioneering work on constructing the empirical counterparts of the terms in the equation of exchange led him to formulate a 4% monetary growth rule. Snyder is especially apposite because he was on the staff of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Why, despite his pioneering empirical work and his position as an insider, did Snyder fail to effectively challenge the dominant real bills views of the Federal Reserve (Fed)? A short answer is that he did not possess a convincing version of the quantity theory that attributed the Great Depression to a contraction in the money stock produced by the Fed, as opposed to the dominant real bills view attributing it to the collapse of speculative excess.

Recent studies have revalued Hazel Kyrk for her original works on consumption and the critique of neoclassical demand theory. Kyrk’s A Theory of Consumption (1923) opened up new perspectives for understanding the nature of consumption and revalued home economics as a central part of the economist agenda, taking distance from the first generation of home economists. This paper focuses on Kyrk’s post-1923 scientific production and professional activities. Our main purpose is to show her contributions to the quantitative foundations of consumption together with her attempt to feed contemporary research on consumers’ behavior with pragmatism, policy advice, and field knowledge. We selected specific issues: the education of consumers through information and a strategy of “critical consumption”; the analysis of strategic industries; the well-being of American families; and the importance of “invisible” objects (non-market activities) and their statistical processing.