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  3. Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics

This series contains original works that challenge and enlighten historians of economics. For the profession as a whole, it promotes better understanding of the origin and content of modern economics.

  • General Editors: Harro Maas, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland

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41 results in Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics

Page 2 of 3

Stabilizing Dynamics
  • Constructing Economic Knowledge
  • E. Roy Weintraub
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    26 April 1991
  • Today, economic theory is a mathematical theory, but that was not always the case. Major changes in the ways economists presented their arguments to one another occurred between the late 1930s and the early 1950s; over that period the discipline became mathematized. Professor Weintraub, a noted scholar of the modern history of economic thought, argues that those changes were not merely cosmetic: The mathematical forms of the arguments significantly altered the substance of the arguments. Stabilizing Dynamics is particularly concerned with the ways in which the rich and confusing talk of the 1930s evolved, over a fifteen-year period, into technical analysis of some mathematical structures. The author describes the context for the history of that change, locating it in the broader intellectual currents, and shows how the history of modern economics can be seen as a confluence of several disparate traditions. Historiographically, this book offers one of the first constructivist accounts of modern economic analysis.

Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory in Historical Perspective
  • Kim Kyun
  • Published online:
    23 March 2010
    Print publication:
    24 June 1988
  • This 1988 book presents a historical investigation of the theoretical development of contemporary Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT). The author examines the central features of the EBCT by tracing both the history of business cycle theory and the history of econometrics. These historical analyses make clear two central principles of the EBCT: its optimization foundation and its economic strategy. Following along these lines, the author argues that the EBCT succeeds the tradition of the Austrian cycle theory that attempted to incorporate the cycle with classical equilibrium doctrine. He further argues that the EBCT's econometric strategy is only a child of the Cowles commission method. Investigating interwar macroeconomics in very readable style, this book brings the period back into the heart of macroeconomic thinking.

The Legacy of Scholasticism in Economic Thought
  • Antecedents of Choice and Power
  • Odd Langholm
  • Published online:
    13 March 2010
    Print publication:
    13 February 1998
  • This book studies the development of ideas on freedom, coercion and power in the history of economic thought. It focuses on the exchange of goods and services and on terms of exchange (interest rates, prices and wages) and examines the nature of choice, that is, the state of the will of economic actors making exchange decisions. In a social context, anyone's range of choice is restricted by the choices made by others. The first to raise the question of the will in this economic context were the medieval scholastics, drawing on non-economic analytic models inherited from antiquity and mainly from Aristotle. From these origins, views on economic choice, coercion and power are recorded, as they gradually change over the centuries, until they manifest themselves in more contemporary disputes between different branches of institutional economics.

Natural Images in Economic Thought
  • Markets Read in Tooth and Claw
  • Edited by Philip Mirowski
  • Published online:
    19 January 2010
    Print publication:
    29 July 1994
  • This 1994 collection of interdisciplinary essays was the first to investigate how images in the history of the natural and physical sciences have been used to shape the history of economic thought. The contributors, historians of science and economics alike, document the extent to which scholars have drawn on physical and natural science to ground economic ideas and evaluate the role and importance of metaphors in the structure and content of economic thought. These range from Aristotle's discussion of the division of labour, to Marshall's evocation of population biology, to Hayek's dependence upon evolutionary concepts, and more recently to neoclassical economists' invocation of chaos theory. Resort to such images, contributors find, was more than mere rhetorical flourish. Rather, appeals to natural and physical metaphors serve to constitute the very subject matter of the discipline and what might be accepted as the 'economic'.

Origins of Law and Economics
  • The Economists' New Science of Law, 1830–1930
  • Heath Pearson
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    28 May 1997
  • This work analyzes the centrality of law in nineteenth-century historical and institutional economics and is a prehistory to the new institutional economics of the late twentieth century. In the 1830s the 'new science of law' aimed to explain the working rules of human society by using the methodologically individualist terms of economic discourse, stressing determinism and evolutionism. Practitioners stood readier than contemporary institutionalists to admit the possibilities of altruistic values, bounded rationality, and institutional inertia into their research program. Professor Pearson shows that the positive analysis of law tended to push normative discussions up from the level of specific laws to that of society's political organization. The analysis suggests that the professionalization of the social sciences - and the new science's own imprecision - condemned the program to oblivion around 1930. Nonetheless, institutional economics is currently developing greater resemblances to the now-forgotten new science.

Institutions in Economics
  • The Old and the New Institutionalism
  • Malcolm Rutherford
  • Published online:
    12 January 2010
    Print publication:
    25 March 1994
  • This book examines and compares the two major traditions of institutionalist thinking in economics: the 'old' institutionalism of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, and Ayres, and the 'new' institutionalism developed more recently from neoclassical and Austrian sources and including the writings of Coase, Williamson, North, Schotter, and many others. The discussion is organized around a set of key methodological, theoretical, and normative problems that necessarily confront any attempt to incorporate institutions (defined to include organizations, laws, and social norms) into economics. These are identified in terms of the issues surrounding the use of formal or non-formal analytical methods, individualist or holistic approaches, the respective roles of rational choice and rule-following behavior, the relative importance of the spontaneous evolution and deliberative design of institutions, and questions concerning the normative appraisal of institutions. The old and the new institutionalism have often been paired on opposite sides of these issues, and the issues themselves presented in a series of sharp dichotomies. Professor Rutherford argues, however, that matters are both more complex and more challenging. Although each tradition embodies fascinating insights into the study of economic institutions - their functioning, evolution, and impact on human welfare - neither has as yet provided fully satisfactory answers to the problems identified.

The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations
  • An Assessment of Thomas Sargent's Achievements
  • Esther-Mirjam Sent
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 August 1998
  • Inspired by recent developments in science studies, this book offers an innovative type of analysis of the recent history of rational expectations economics. In the course of exploring the multiple dimensions of rational expectations analysis, Professor Sent focuses on the work of Thomas Sargent, an instrumental pioneer in the development of this school of thought. The investigation attempts to avoid a Whiggish history that sees Sargent's development as inevitably progressing to better and better economic analysis. Instead, it provides an illustration of what happened to the approach through a contextualization of Sargent's work vis-á-vis that of other scholars and ideas. The treatment aims to illuminate some of the shifting negotiations and alliances that characterize the rise and shift of direction in rational expectations economics. The Evolving Rationality of Rational Expectations won the 1998 Gunnar Myrdal Prize of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy for the best monograph on a theme broadly in accord with the EAEPE Theoretical Perspectives.

Monetary Theory and Bretton Woods
  • The Construction of an International Monetary Order
  • Filippo Cesarano
  • Published online:
    18 December 2009
    Print publication:
    04 September 2006
  • Over the twentieth century monetary theory played a crucial role in the evolution of the international monetary system. The severe shocks and monetary gyrations of the interwar years interacted with theoretical developments that superseded the rigid rules of commodity standards and led to the full-fledged conception of monetary policy. The definitive demise of the gold standard then paved the way for monetary reconstruction. Monetary theory was a decisive factor in the design of the reform proposals, in the Bretton Woods negotiations, and in forging the new monetary order. The Bretton Woods system - successful but nevertheless short-lived - suffered from latent inconsistencies, both analytical and institutional, which fatally undermined the foundations of the postwar monetary architecture and brought about the epochal transition from commodity money to fiat money.

Harry Johnson
  • A Life in Economics
  • D. E. Moggridge
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    21 April 2008
  • Harry Johnson (1923–1977) was such a striking figure in economics that Nobel Laureate James Tobin designated the third quarter of the twentieth century as 'the age of Johnson'. Johnson played a leading role in the development and extension of the Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade. Within monetary economics he was also a seminal figure who identified and explained the links between the ideas of the major post-war innovators. His discussion of the issues that would benefit from further work set the profession's agenda for a generation. This book chronicles his intellectual development and his contributions to economics, economic education and the discussion of economic policy.

Adam Smith's Moral Philosophy
  • A Historical and Contemporary Perspective on Markets, Law, Ethics, and Culture
  • Jerry Evensky
  • Published online:
    11 November 2009
    Print publication:
    03 October 2005
  • Adam Smith is the best known among economists for his book, The Wealth of Nations, often viewed as the keystone of modern economic thought. For many he has become associated with a quasi-libertarian laissez-faire philosophy. Others, often heterodox economists and social philosophers, on the contrary, focus on Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and explore his moral theory. There has been a long debate about the relationship or lack thereof between these, his two great works. This work treats these dimensions of Smith's work as elements in a seamless moral philosophical vision, demonstrating the integrated nature of these works and Smith's other writings. This book weaves Smith into a constructive critique of modern economic analysis (engaging along the way the work of Nobel Laureates Gary Becker, Amarty Sen, Douglass North, and James Buchanan) and builds bridges between that discourse and the other social sciences.

The History of Econometric Ideas
  • Mary S. Morgan
  • Published online:
    26 October 2009
    Print publication:
    26 April 1990
  • The History of Econometric Ideas covers the period from the late-nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, illustrating how economists first learnt to harness statistical methods to measure and test the 'laws' of economics. Though scholarly, Dr Morgan's book is very accessible and does not require a high level of prior statistical knowledge.

The Intellectual Foundations of Alfred Marshall's Economic Science
  • A Rounded Globe of Knowledge
  • Simon J. Cook
  • Published online:
    25 October 2009
    Print publication:
    06 July 2009
  • This book provides a contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall's thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall's thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, which saw him supplementing Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel's Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall's early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall's mature economic science was conceived by him as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian, social philosophy.

From New Era to New Deal
  • Herbert Hoover, the Economists, and American Economic Policy, 1921–1933
  • William J. Barber
  • Published online:
    19 October 2009
    Print publication:
    27 September 1985
  • In popular imagery, Herbert Hoover is often stereotyped as a 'do-nothing' president who offered only nineteenth-century slogans for the greatest economic catastrophe in twentieth-century American history. Nothing could be further from the truth. This study examines the properties of an innovative approach to economic growth and stability formulated by Hoover and his associates during his years as secretary of commerce (1921–9) and inspects his deployment of this strategy from the White House following the Great Crash in the autumn of 1929. Attention is then focused on Hoover's attempts to reformulate his macro-economic programme as the depression deepened in late 1931 and 1932. Archival materials provide arresting insights into Hoover's aspirations for a new institution - the Reconstruction Finance Corporations - as a vehicle for stimulating investment through a novel form of 'off-budget' financing. To complement the discussion of Hoover's theories of economic policy in their various manifestations, the views of contemporary economists on problems of the day are surveyed.

International Monetary Economics, 1870–1960
  • Between the Classical and the New Classical
  • M. June Flanders
  • Published online:
    12 October 2009
    Print publication:
    23 February 1990
  • This is a history of international monetary thought from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It provides a comprehensive survey of the literature produced on international macroeconomics for that period. It will be of interest to teachers of and graduate students in international monetary economics, monetary theory, and the history of economic thought. Professor Flanders argues that progress in the field of international monetary economics (or in the discipline as a whole) has not been linear. Instead of writing a sequential, chronological story, she has classified the literature according to groupings of ideas and classes of models. After a brief survey of the Classical doctrines, the book covers the developments of major approaches, which are labelled Neoclassical, Late Classical, and Keynesian. The models are conceptualized in two streams: stream F encompasses formal, long-run equilibrium models, all of which emerge from a common proto-model involving the endogeneity of the money supply under fixed exchange rates. Stream P deals with policy-oriented short-run equilibrium and disequilibrium approaches. There is emphasis throughout on the varying roles assigned by the several approaches to international trade in financial assets, that is, to international capital flows.

Austrian Economics in America
  • The Migration of a Tradition
  • Karen I. Vaughn
  • Published online:
    06 October 2009
    Print publication:
    27 May 1994
  • This 1994 book examines the development of the ideas of the new Austrian school from its beginnings in Vienna in the 1870s to the present. It focuses primarily in showing how the coherent theme that emerges from the thought of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Lachman, Israel Kirzner and a variety of new younger Austrians is an examination of the implications of time and ignorance (or processes and knowledge) for economic theory.

Economic Theories in a Non-Walrasian Tradition
  • Takashi Negishi
  • Published online:
    21 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 July 1985
  • This book covers a broad range of topics in the history of economics that have relevance to economic theories. The author believes that one of the tasks for a historian of economics is to analyze and interpret theories currently outside the mainstream of economic theory, in this case non-Walrasian economics. By doing so, he argues, new directions and new areas for research can be developed that will extend the current theories. Familiar topics covered include: the division of labor, economies of scale, wages, profit, international trade, market mechanisms, and money. These are considered in the light of the well-known non-Walrasian schools of thought: the classical, Marxian, Austrian, and Cambridge schools.

Schumpeter and the Idea of Social Science
  • A Metatheoretical Study
  • Yuichi Shionoya
  • Published online:
    18 September 2009
    Print publication:
    10 April 1997
  • This book is a comprehensive investigation of the work of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), one of the great economists of the twentieth century. In this study, Yuichi Shionoya highlights Schumpeter's methodological views and emphasizes his ideal of a universal social science. Taking on board all aspects of his work, he reconstructs a system which encompasses theory (economic statics, economic dynamics, economic sociology) and metatheory (philosophy of science, history and sociology of science). The originality of Schumpeter's work - which the author calls the two-structure approach to the evolution of mind and society - is examined in the light of the intellectual field in Germany and Austria in the early twentieth century. This book is a major contribution to the history of economic thought.

Theory and Measurement
  • Causality Issues in Milton Friedman's Monetary Economics
  • J. Daniel Hammond
  • Published online:
    16 September 2009
    Print publication:
    29 March 1996
  • Focusing on the period of Milton Friedman's collaboration with Anna J. Schwartz, from 1948 to 1991, this 1996 work examines the history of debates between Friedman and his critics over money's causal role in business cycles. Professor Hammond shows that critics' reactions were grounded in two distinctive features of Friedman and Schwartz's way of doing economic analysis - their National Bureau business cycle methods and Friedman's Marshallian methodology. With the post-war dominance of Cowles Commission methods and Walrasian methodology, Friedman and Schwartz's monetary economics appeared to contemporary critics to be 'measurement without theory'. Drawing extensively upon unpublished materials, Professor Hammond's treatment offers new insights on Milton Friedman's attempts to settle debates with his critics and his eventual recognition of the methodological impediments. The book will interest monetary economists and macroeconomists, as well as historians of economics and methodologists.

Designs within Disorder
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Economists, and the Shaping of American Economic Policy, 1933–1945
  • William J. Barber
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    28 June 1996
  • More than any of his predecessors in the White House, Franklin D. Roosevelt drew heavily on the thinking of economists as he sought to combat the Great Depression, to mobilize the American economy for war, and to chart a new order for the post-war world. Designs Within Disorder, published in 1996, is an inquiry into the way divergent analytic perspectives competed for official favour and the manner in which the President opted to pick and choose among them when formulating economic policies. During the Roosevelt years, two 'revolutions' were underway simultaneously. One of them involved a fundamental restructuring of the American economy and of the role government was to play in it. A second was an intellectual revolution which engaged economists in reconceptualizing the nature of their discipline. Most of the programmatic initiatives Roosevelt put in place displayed a remarkable staying power for over half a century.

International Organizations and the Analysis of Economic Policy, 1919–1950
  • Anthony M. Endres, Grant A. Fleming
  • Published online:
    29 July 2009
    Print publication:
    24 June 2002
  • This 2002 book expands our understanding of the distinctive policy analysis produced between 1919 and 1950 by economists and other social scientists for four major international organizations: the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization, the Bank for International Settlements, and the United Nations. These practitioners included some of the twentieth century's eminent economists, including Cassel, Haberler, Kalecki, Meade, Morgenstern, Nurkse, Ohlin, Tinbergen, and Viner. Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes also influenced the work of these organizations. Topics covered include: the relationship between economics and policy analysis in international organizations; business cycle research; the role and conduct of monetary policy; public investment; trade policy; social and labor economics; international finance; the coordination problem in international macroeconomic policy; full employment economics; and the rich-country-poor-country debate. Normative agendas underlying international political economy are made explicit, and lessons are distilled for today's debates on international economic integration.

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