When the article “Experimental Confirmation of the Existence of a Giffen Good,” authored by Raymond C. Battalio, John H. Kagel, and Carl A. Kogut, appeared in 1991 in the American Economic Review it represented the culmination of two separate and seemingly unrelated traditions in the economics literature. The first is a now-venerable tradition of attempting to locate Giffen behavior in the real world. The second is a more truncated modern tradition of animal experimentation in economics. In their article, Battalio et al. combine these traditions through setting out to discover Giffen behavior in a laboratory setting using white rats as experimental subjects. The authors (p. 962) describe their experimental procedure:

Subjects were placed in an experimental chamber for approximately three hours each day, during which time they received their entire daily liquid food ration … A rat obtained quinine and root beer by pressing either of two levers mounted on a wall in the experimental chamber … Income was controlled by restricting the number of lever presses that would result in obtaining liquid. Prices were changed by varying the amount of liquid obtained at each lever press.

In the December 1928 issue of the Economic Journal, Frank Ramsey asked the question “how much of its income should a nation save?” Few of the Cambridge economists of the 1930s were convinced by his highly formalized answer. His contribution sank quickly into oblivion, remaining there for about thirty-five years. In the 1960s, the success of the Hamiltonian formalism and the increasing interest for optimal growth led on the contrary to a quasi “natural” use of Ramsey's former intuitions. These mathematical tools became so widespread that, a few years later, new classical macroeconomics uses a new interpretation of the “à la Ramsey” models, within the setting of representative agent models, in order to bypass the Arrow and Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu “impossibility results.” The “à la Ramsey” model is the backbone of modern new classical macroeconomics. It is thus not surprising that these successive moves in macro-economic theory came to foster a slanted interpretation of Ramsey's 1928 article. In this respect, Roger E. A. Farmer's point of view is representative of the retrospective tribute sometimes paid to Ramsey's article:

F. Ramsey was one of the first economists to study how an infinitely lived agent should allocate his resources over time. His work was at the forefront of mathematical economics at the time it was written but his approach has now become a standard part of graduate macroeconomic courses. Many applications of Ramsey's work assume that there is only one agent in the economy and that this representative agent can be thought of as a stand-in for the workings of the market mechanism (Farmer 1993, p. 77).

During the period 1871–1918, Sweden was under the in.uence, in many respects, of intellectual currents emanating from the German Empire. On the plane of economic policy many Swedish social scientists and public debaters were in.uenced by German Kathedersozialismus and state socialism. In Sweden, as in other countries, this heritage has long been tucked out of view in historical writings, perhaps because there was not much to boast about after the defeat of the “German model” in the First World War.1 Interest has begun to awaken in recent years, however. Leading economists such as Gustav von Schmoller and Adolph Wagner have attracted attention (see e.g., Backhaus 1997) and their in.uence in the United States has been examined (Carlson 1999, Rodgers 1998, and Senn 1997). In Sweden, too, interest in German Kathedersozialismus and state socialism is rising with respect to its in.uence on social scientists (Wisselgren 2000) and (social democratic) politicians (Karlsson 2001).

It is surely Israel M. Kirzner who has promoted the role of the entrepreneur more than any other author in the second half of the twentieth century. His description of the market process and entrepreneurship in his Competition and the Market Process (1973) represents a seminal contribution to Austrian thinking, although it has been slow to catch on in broader circles. As Humberto Barreto argues above, for example, an entrepreneurial role seems to have disappeared from mainstream economics as the theory of the firm progressed (1989, pp. 95–98). The standard core of microeconomics allows little room for entrepreneurial elements, particularly if the latter are defined in terms of uncertainty, intuition, ignorance, and disequilibrium. In light of this intellectual discord and given his recent retirement, it is timely to reconsider Kirzner's unceasing efforts to resurrect the role of the entrepreneur, and especially his effort to reconcile this role with conventional neoclassical approaches.

Through the 1930s, Frank H. Knight engaged the economic profession in a prodigious exchange over the nature and productivity of capital. Knight's efforts here were driven by three significant objectives: first, that capital theory had to be able to explain the broad fact of capital accumulation and growth as actually experienced by progressive societies; second, that existing doctrines had to be purged of the flawed vestiges of the classical-Ricardian theory of production if any progress was to be had in achieving the first objective; third, and last, that an alternative theory of capital needed to provide an explanation of the productivity of capital consistent with the fulfillment of the first two tasks. Knight failed in the third task or, at best, left the task incomplete.

In a recent article in this journal, Laurent Derobert (2001) examined the origins of the canonical model of labor supply. According to this model, workers will exchange “leisure” for work at a rate determined by the hourly wage. In this case, labor supply will be a simple function of the utility of leisure and the utility of income. Paradoxically, this permits the understanding of labor supply to proceed without consideration of labor itself. Derobert identifies Philip H. Wicksteed (1910) as the originator of this approach. Apparently he was the first economist to model labor supply in terms of a leisure-income trade-off. Thus it is claimed that Wicksteed bequeathed to the economics profession the paradox of the “labor-less labor supply model.”