After three or more decades of mainly positivistic readings of the economics of Adam Smith, there was a decided movement following the bicentennial of the publication of the Wealth of Nations to broaden the agenda of Smithian studies. The publication in 1978 of the Report of 1762–63 of Smith's lectures in jurisprudence added impetus to this movement. In particular, historians of ideas began to pay increased attention to Smith's concern with justice in economic life. That attention has evoked renewed interest in certain of Smith's intellectual antecedents who may have played a part in shaping his ideas, but whose influence has remained a matter of relative neglect in modern scholarship.

From this same rostrum several years ago, outgoing president Bill Barber (1990, p. 110) said that presidential addresses tend to fall into one of two broad categories. Category I speeches typically survey the state of the art, identify promising directions for future research, and attempt to justify our scholarly existence to skeptics who doubt the value of studying the world of dead economists. Category II speeches draw their form and substance from the speaker's particular research interests.

This paper reviews the way in which constructivist or anti-representationalist arguments have been used as an argument in favor of changing the way we write the history of economic thought. It is argued that though such arguments provide some important new perspectives on the subject, their use as a comprehensive methodological critique of “traditional” approaches to the subject rests on the theses that a non-foundationalist methodology is impossible, and that we can assume that contemporary economics is in a healthy state. If these theses are not accepted, the case against “traditional” histories collapses.

Karl Marx's theory of land rent plays a minor role in his overall economic system but provides us with a good opportunity to examine and score his analytic powers and attained understanding. The conclusion arrived at from the present reinvestigation confirms, I fear, the diagnosis that Marx was an autodidact who lacked mastery of the subject matter that he so confidently grappled with. Objective readers of my analysis can form their own judgments of Marx's written logic and empirical contentions.

The last decade has seen an outburst of growth models designed to replace the conventional Solow growth model, with its exogenous trend of technical progress, by more realistic models that generate increasing returns (to labor, capital and/or scale) as a result of endogenous technical progress. In contrast to the Solow model, the new models suggest that policy interventions can affect the long-run rate of economic growth. Nicholas Kaldor's growth model, designed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to replace the Solow growth model, is a precursor of the new growth models.

According to the folklore of economics, H. L. Moore (1869–1958) in Economic Cycles: Their Law and Cause (1914) mistakenly called his estimates of the supply of pig iron the demand for pig iron. The reviews of Economic Cycles by R. A. Lehfeldt (1915) and P. G. Wright (1915) initiated the folklore, which G. J. Stigler (1962) repeated in his obituary of Moore. Recently the folklore reappeared in histories of economics by M. Blaug (1986), K. Kim (1988), R. J. Epstein (1989), and M. S. Morgan (1990). Morgan, who was particularly critical of Moore, wrote that his empirical work “produced a relationship which he interpreted as a positive demand curve for pig-iron. This, of course, contradicted the negative relationship between the price and quantity stipulated by standard economic theory…. Moore's approach was a mixture. At its worst, it involved both the unthinking application of theory to data and the adoption of empirically derived relationships without reference to theory” (Morgan 1990, pp. 28, 141).

When William Stanley Jevons first presented his theory of exchange, he used the example of two trading bodies (A and B) holding stocks of corn and beef (goods X and Y), but he was eager to show how the basic results could be applied to a variety of situations. After considering the relatively simple introduction of transport costs, Jevons added three subsections (Jevons 1957, pp. 111–19) which demonstrated his confident handling of his approach. There have been many critical comments on Jevons's handling of mathematics, including those of Alfred Marshall in his review of the Theory of Political Economy (Jevons 1872; see Black 1981). However, these examples show that Jevons produced a clear and succinct statement of the mathematical structure of the theory of exchange.

Between 1830 and 1860, Germany provided the world with some of the pioneers of marginalism. Johann Heinrich von Thünen and Hermann Heinrich Gossen are shining examples. Then German theory declined. The center of German-language theory shifted to Vienna, and from 1885 to 1930 the German academic establishment, dominated by the Historical School, was virtually cut off from the progress of mainstream economics. Things began to change around 1930; German economists started again to make original contributions. By the end of the war, they had provided Germany with a solid link to the mainstream. Except for Erich Schneider, nobody contributed as much to this development as Heinrich von Stackelberg.

Ronald Coase's 1960 article, “The Problem of Social Cost,” has been one of the most influential works in the development of welfare economics since A. C. Pigou's The Economics of Welfare. Principally, the article made the definition and distribution of property rights a central issue when discussing the efficiency problems of negative externalities. Coase's approach has given rise to most of the economics of tort law and alternative liability rules. It has also led to the development of the “property rights” approach to environmental economics that has found prominence as an alternative to traditional Pigovian analysis.

As is well-known, Karl Marx distinguished three types of rent. In addition to two categories of differential rent, closely related to the Ricardian extensive and intensive margins, he argued (against David Ricardo) that rent was paid on the least fertile land. For Marx this so-called “absolute rent” resulted from the barrier posed by landed property to the free movement of capital into agricultural production. Since the organic composition of capital was relatively low in agriculture, the prices of production of farm products were lower than their labor values. The existence of private property in land prevented the reduction of agricultural prices to these prices of production, and allowed the payment of rent even on what could be described, in Ricardian terms, as marginal land. There exists a sizeable literature on Marx's theory of absolute rent,1 but there is no systematic account of its gestation and development. In this paper we explain how Marx's critique of Ricardian rent theory evolved between his first doubts early in 1851 and the articulation of a distinctive alternative analysis in the manuscripts of 1862–63. We also assess the influence exerted on Marx by Richard Jones and Johann Karl Rodbertus, and briefly discuss the significance of Marx's theory of absolute rent for his political economy as a whole.

Robert Heilbroner (1990) challenges us to re-examine our preconceptions about the development of economic analysis in the twentieth century. John Maynard Keynes (1951, p. 141) once said, in a discussion concerning Alfred Marshall, that the “master economist…must study the present in light of the past for the purposes of the future,” and in this regard Heilbroner's essay is the work of a historian of economics who commands our attention and respect. The purpose of his essay “is to inquire into the successes and failures of economic thought in anticipating the march of actual events” (Heilbroner 1990, p. 1097). The failures, Heilbroner points out, considerably outweigh the successes. But, he conjectures, even in those cases of success, the success is not due to superior analysis. Rather, “the success of the farsighted seem accounted for more by their prescient ‘visions’ than by their superior analyses” (ibid., p. 1098).

Though beauty of diction, harmony of periods, and acuteness and singularity of sentiment, may captivate the reader, yet there are other qualifications essentially necessary…. Fidelity, accuracy and impartiality are also requisite (Joseph Towers, Observations on Mr. Hume's History (1778)).

Many authors have interpreted Nassau Senio's ideas on abstinence through the years to mean that a cause/effect relation exists between interest and abstinence and that interest is the reward for abstinence. Some typical examples of this treatment are as follows: “The original abstinence theory of interest for which Senior is famous has long been recognized as the most complete of the classical theories, and under various names has become incorporated in the general corpus of economic theory” (Bowley 1937, p. 137). “Nassau Senior…introduced the ‘abstinence theory’ of interest, and he is criticized both for its one-sidedness and for using it to imply that the ‘pain’ of the capitalist is in some sense proportional to the ‘reward’ he ‘earns’ by abstaining. On page 189 of Political Economy, Senior describes abstinence as the cause of interest in terms which would readily explain this general interpretation, and in his public-policy pronouncements he further supports it” (Conard 1959, p. 26). “Senior's contribution to capital theory was to identify this reward for ‘abstinence’ as interest, or the cost of waiting, during which time capital could be accumulated. Senior's description of interest as a return to abstinence was his most original contribution to economics, and it soon became assimilated into the mainstream of economic theory. In it he surpassed Smith, Malthus and Ricardo and his analysis of capital and interest stood as the most complete in British economics until the time of Jevons” (Ekelund and Hébert 1975, p. 103).

The appointment of Arthur Cecil Pigou as Alfred Marshall's successor has generated some interest among historians of economic thought (Coase 1972; Coats 1971; and Jones 1978). All agree that the 1908 election was highly political, affected by Marshall's intense efforts to manipulate the process in favor of Pigou and against Herbert S. Foxwell. T. W. Jones sheds light on “the lengths to which Marshall felt able to go in his support of Pigou and, in particular, the manner in which this impinged on one of the electors in 1908, J. N. Keynes” (Jones 1978, p. 235). This is interesting in the wake of John Neville Keynes's many conflicting roles: he was an elector, a friend of Foxwell, and father of John Maynard Keynes, who had failed to secure a Fellowship at King's College earlier that year. Regardless of the motives behind Marshall's maneuvers or the manner in which he accomplished his objective, the outcome of the election left Foxwell extremely, but understandably, disappointed and embittered. Some of this disappointment and bitterness must have been felt toward Marshall's successor, Pigou, of whom Foxwell did not think very highly to begin with. On different occasions, Foxwell had thought Pigou to be “an extreme agitator on a side not popular either here [Cambridge] or among influential people in the country”; “the last Economist I wish to see in any position where he could influence economic study. He has ruined it at Cambridge where complaints are incessant”; and “worse than useless”.

Two years after her success in the Moral Sciences Tripos (two examiners placed her in the First class and two in the Second), Mary Paley was asked to write an economics textbook for Extension Lecture students. On her engagement, the book became a joint effort with her fiance, later husband, Alfred Marshall. It was published in October 1879 and reprinted nine times between 1879 and 1891, including a revised edition in 1881. A third edition was worked on, probably around 1885, but not published. According to John Maynard Keynes, 15,000 copies of the book were sold in all (Pigou 1925, p. 500). Sometime in the late 1880s or early 1890s, Marshall rejected the book, criticizing its elementary nature and brevity—it was impossible, he felt, “to tell the truth for half-a-crown” (M. P. Marshall 1947, p. 22). When he sent his brother-in-law, E. D. Guillebaud, a complimentary copy of the Principles in 1890, Marshall stipulated that the Economics of Industry must be returned for destruction (Guillebaud 1961,2, p. 12, note c). In 1892 he produced a small book “made chiefly by scissors and paste out of my Principles,” which on its spine bore the title Economics of Industry.