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Given the unconditional favour that scholars imbued with classical ideas should bestow on any manifestation of business freedom and entrepreneurial spirit, it was not a given that classical jurists and economists would join the ranks of those who in the late 19th century complained about the corporatisation of the American economy. The usual explanation is that they did so out of doctrinal and practical concerns for the effect of the associated rise of monopolies and trusts. A complementary account exists, however, offered by law historians and based on the doctrinal controversies about the true nature of corporations triggered by the famous Santa Clara decision (1886) of the US Supreme Court. The paper casts new light on the latter account by uncovering those aspects of classical economics that made it impossible for its supporters – economists and jurists alike – to unreservedly support the corporate form before and beyond the trust problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the debate on the international clearing mechanism from the pioneering proposals of the nineteenth century to the years of high theory, at the beginning of the 1940s, when several plans were defined to establish international clearing mechanisms, and the well-known John Maynard Keynes's International Clearing Union Plan was joined by other projects proposed by Paul Einzig and two German-born economists, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher and Hubert Ladenburg. As is well known, the Keynes plan was conceived as a response to the Nazi plan to establish a multilateral clearing system for regulating trade relations in the economic space of the countries occupied by the Third Reich. However, Keynes did not elaborate a plan radically opposed to the Nazi proposal, but shared its essential core. While being opposite sides of the conflict, both Nazi Germany and the British government proposed the same monetary order, based on multilateral clearing system, for the post-war world. The project of a new international monetary order based on the multilateral clearing system was not unanimously shared among the Allies: the United States moved on different lines confirming the centrality of gold in the post-war world order. Economic interests imposed the restoration of gold-exchange standard, based on the dollar supremacy and the Bretton Woods agreement, confirming the political success of Harry Dexter White's proposal, was a turning point in a spontaneous path towards a new international order based on clearing agreements. Keynes proposed an economically realistic solution, based on the experience of clearing agreements resulting from the collapse of the gold exchange standard, but his plan was politically unrealistic in the face of the interests of the United States superpower. Keynes did not accept a compromise, but was simply defeated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is concerned with war in the history of economic thought. It looks at disputes about abstraction versus historicism over the long 19th century, in relation to war and the state. It then looks at the historical setting in which Léon Walras and others developed their ideas of political economy. It concludes with reflections on the presence or absence of the state in modern economic history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the light of the recent literature on the intellectual history of inequality, this paper offers the first survey and a tentative classification of the Italian literature addressing issues related to social mobility, from the late 19th century to the "Economic Miracle" of the 1950s. During these decades, the foremost Italian economists and statisticians (among others, Pareto, Gini, Einaudi and Pantaleoni) worked on issues highly related to the modern understanding of social mobility, from the role of inheritance to the intergenerational transmission of status. While reflecting the evolution and debates in Italian society, these authors also participated in a broader international debate, which should lead us to reconsider the supposed lack of interest in inequality among the economists of this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the closing years of the nineteenth century in the United States, Charlotte Perkins Gilman emphasised the connection between the rules governing the socio-economic institutions of her time and those of home economics. She called for radical transformations of the economy of the home as a way of promoting the "new woman" which would reduce social tensions and improve the economy. Gilman's most valuable contribution to economics was that she permanently made gender economics a decisive analytical framework for her successors to use in many of their own works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Edward Hearn is generally regarded as Australia's first economist of international note and his Plutology ([1863]1864) is invariably deemed to be Australia's first economics text. In this paper I argue that it is more appropriate to describe Hearn as an Anglo-Irish economist and, to this end, provide the Anglo-Irish context for the economic doctrines that he expressed in Plutology and elsewhere. I also argue that the failure of Plutology in the market place was, in part, due to a campaign waged against Hearn in London by John Elliot Cairnes, who was an undergraduate contemporary of Hearn's at Trinity College, Dublin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically assesses Marshall's organic growth theory. Although Marshall insisted that economic biology is ‘the economist's Mecca,’ he did not originally develop the organic growth theory. However, we focus on the concept of ‘organic growth’ and explore Marshall's idea of economic biology. We discuss the concept of ‘organic,’ the structure of the organic growth theory, and the relationship between mechanical economics and economic biology. In particular, we focus on the last chapter of the fifth edition of Principles of Economics. Marshall did not develop his theory in these subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The phrase 'technological change' does not appear in the index of Marshall's second major book, Industry and Trade, nor does it appear in the index of that of his first major work, Principles of Economics. Yet the nature of the contents of the second book, Industry and Trade, indicates that technological progress is part of the analysis, with special reference to Marshall's discussion of the industrial leadership secured by England during the nineteenth century, and the claims thereto by France, Germany and the United States (Book I, chapters III-VIII). Causes of technological change, and its impact on the size of firms were discussed by Marshall in Book II (especially chapters II and III), while the matter is also treated in the context of changes in business organisation (Book II, chapters X-XII). This paper, in its various sections, therefore acts as a reminder of the fact that Marshall's Industry and Trade was primarily concerned with 'the origins of modern industrial technique and business organisation', as he put it himself in the introduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both J. S. Mill and A. Marshall had a lifelong interest in the living conditions of the working classes and theorized the possibility of a new age, characterized by a widespread mental and moral cultivation. This paper compares the precise arguments put forward by them in the period ranging from Mill's to Marshall's Principles, against the background of the evidence of social and human progress at their times. It is argued that, at different stages and with different specific arguments, their predictions relied on self-reinforcing mechanisms, in which a better life was the cause, no less than the effect, of progress. In order to make similarities and differences more transparent from a logical point of view, two simple mathematical formulations are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore a French debate in the nineteenth century Liberal School: the question of inheritance. We first present the opposition among liberal economists between the advocates of the liberty of bequest and the defenders of its limitations. We then try to show that these contrasted positions cannot be reduced to the confrontation between the doctrine of natural rights and the principle of social utility. Finally, we propose another explanation for the divergences of the Liberal School through different conceptions of the State. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The process of institutionalisation of political economy has become of increasing interest in tracing the evolution of economic thought. This paper presents a comparison of the development of these processes in Italy and Spain, through the analysis of the presence of political economy in some institutions in both countries between 1860 and 1900: universities, economic associations, economic journals and national parliaments. This essay aims at supplying new insights to the consolidation of economics as a scientific and socially appreciated field of knowledge, and exploring the influence of the form of institutionalisation on the economic ideas diffused in a particular country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper retraces the origins of the unbundling of infrastructure, which is a monopoly, from services, which are subject to competition. Using the case of the railroad industry in France, I examine how both natural monopoly theorists and legislation dealt with this subject in the nineteenth century. I argue that the origins of vertical unbundling date to this period with legislation pertaining to inland waterways and railroads. This was particularly the case for the railroad industry due to pricing and competition rationales. I analyze the writings of Dupuit and Walras, and show that they both agreed that infrastructure and services had to be unbundled for the inland waterways. In contrast, they expressed different justifications to defend the monopoly for the railroad industry. Following a chronological progression, the first section explores the origins of unbundling in legislation. The second section analyzes how theorists approached the way railroads had to be managed. Throughout, I highlight the interplay between their work and legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article transcripts and comments a hitherto unpublished letter by David Ricardo, dated 19 January 1823 and addressed to Grenfell. In this letter Ricardo opposes the adoption of a double standard of money, two years after the return to convertibility of banknotes and in the midst of an economic recession that pressed for drastic monetary changes. It contains an argument – linking the double standard of money, the seignorage on the silver coin, the behaviour of the Bank of England, and the fall in the value of the pound – which is to be found nowhere else in Ricardo's works. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the basis of the 19th century mathematical economics literature initiated by Cournot, the paper shows the coexistence of two contrasting views of competition, which may be associated, as already suggested by Edgeworth, with the two themes of peace and war. According to the first view (Jevons, Walras, Marshall), competition is characterised, independently of market structure, by the peaceful price taking conduct of consumers and producers. Rivalry is not completely absent, but it concerns the interaction of mediating professional dealers. According to the second view (Bertrand, Launhardt), competition appears as an aggressive strategic interaction between producers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a group of Catholic political economists in France in the 1830s, which was described by the Dublin Review as ‘Catholic in its faith, and Catholic in its manner of conceiving science’. A first section clarifies how contemporaries perceived this group. This is followed by an analysis of Villeneuve-Bargemont's Economie politique Chrétienne in order to outline a standard Catholic approach to political economy. Finally, that standard is used to chart the work of other Catholic economists within that group and to contrast it with the approach followed by other contemporary social political economists. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In The Economics of Welfare, Pigou develops the idea of what will be widely known as ‘Pigouvian tax’. Together with the concept of externality, they constituted two of the most important founding elements of modern welfare economics. Many have suggested that, on the way he treated externalities, Pigou might have drawn from his master, Alfred Marshall (see the proposal for a ‘fresh air rate’). The aim of this paper is to inquire into the features of the original proposals made both by Marshall and Pigou, underline the differences between the two and challenge the hypothesis of ‘continuity’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Herman Gossen's book is usually praised for its contribution to the mathematisation of economics and the obsessive presence of religious references is unduly left out. This paper takes both dimensions seriously and explains how the religious emphasis is crucial for a historical and theoretical understanding of Gossen's view on maximisation of utility and the government of rational and selfish human beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nineteenth-century economic commentators did not possess a formal measure of the rate at which productivity was increasing during the industrial take-off. Yet they did develop an intuitive method based on the comparative change in long-period prices and wages. This paper reviews the contributions of G.R. Porter and R. Giffen and, in the light of some modern contributions, presents an assessment of their rationality and improvability under current standards. It is argued that a proper measure of industrial productivity increase based on long-run prices is the mathematical dual of a Solovian measure of the industrial total factor productivity growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing interpretation of Dupuit's conflict with the French liberal school on the question of justice consists of a simple opposition between public utility and natural rights. This paper aims to show that Dupuit's position is far more complex: justice is based on welfare - and thus on public utility - although natural rights are not excluded from his scheme. An understanding of Dupuit's concept requires a clarification of the differences between three notions - public interest, welfare and public utility - and, by the same token, of the factors linking each notion to the others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

French liberal economists share a very surprising reading of Bentham's theory. In this paper, we underline the method according to which these economists understand Bentham's utilitarianism: they consider that utilitarianism deals with 'utility' but disregards justice. Such an interpretation appears when they tried to oppose the 'French school' and 'English school' of economics as well as when they discussed the foundation of property rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nineteenth-century France, the nature and functions of the State were an almost constant subject of debate among liberal economists. The aim of this paper is to analyse and restate some hitherto neglected discussions and to discover some bold ideas that could form the hallmarks of a French approach to the question. The enquiry starts at the turn of the century with the seminal work of J.-B. Say and writings by A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy, who both shaped the liberal reflection on public economics during this period. But the works of these authors suffered from important ambiguities. It is shown how subsequent liberal economists - Ch. Dunoyer, V. de Broglie, G. de Molinari, E. de Girardin, P. Leroy-Beaulieu - tried to deal with some of the unresolved questions and, mainly on the basis of Say's work, developed original approaches focusing on the productivity of public spending, the role of the State as a factor of production, utopian views of the State as a private company, and finally the inexorable political and administrative logic of the modern electoral State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an encompassing portrayal of Thoreau's economic thought. It is analyzed against the background of the history of economic thought and the economic thinking of his time. Thoreau's economic thought is an extensive examination of the ideas of classical political economy, and particularly of Jean-Baptiste Say, and it is a fundamental critique thereof. Thoreau recognizes that some aspects and foundations of the modern conception of the economy lead to an alienation of the human being from itself as well as to an alienation from nature. I demonstrate that this critique is a result of Thoreau's specific approach to the economy, which, based on his particular understanding of the human being and his philosophy of nature, seeks the meaning of the economy for human life and for nature. In this philosophical approach, which I characterize as an economic philosophy, Thoreau's deeper defiance of classical political economy and his original place within the history of economic thought are grounded. It leads Thoreau to an alternative conception of an economy of moderation, which is identified and described in detail. I conclude with considerations on the potential meaning of Thoreau's thought for current economic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In retrospect and erroneously the nineteenth century international gold standard was interpreted as a quest for monetary discipline. The discipline argument was introduced after WWI in support for a restoration of the gold standard. The interwar failure led to an emphasis on international balances, the argument which came to the fore in the preparations for the Bretton Woods system. The balance argument was central in the early discussions of monetary union in Europe, but with the criticism of Keynesianism the discipline argument became determinant in the design of the Economic and Monetary Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The comprehension of German political economy in the 19th century has been influenced by the so called Sonderweg thesis, which emphasises German "exceptionalism". This interpretation points to the presence of an alleged derogatory influence of the Historical School, intertwined with an advocacy of statism and economic nationalism. Here, we show that the literature has questioned this sort of interpretation and collaborate to this renewed perspective. We examine definitions of political economy presented in German textbooks during the 19th century, to consubstantiate the claim that there was a coexistence of perspectives in German political economy, rather than a unanimous "exceptional" approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells the story of the field of the history of economic thought in relation to the changing boundaries between the disciplines of economics and economic history. The most important period was the late nineteenth century when, after a couple of decades during which both economists and historians took an interest in the history of economic ideas, both disciplines stabilized in ways that left no room for it. Despite the emergence of the history of economic thought as a recognizable field within economics, it was progressively marginalized within the broader profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protagonist of Edgar Bauer's 1843 novella Es leben feste Grundsätze! is a young intellectual named "Karl". It can hardly be doubted that Bauer's novella is a polemical character study of Karl Marx: the rather demeaning picture of "Herr Karl" belongs to the heat of controversy between Marx and die Freien, the Berlin Young Hegelians, after the end of their participation in the Rheinische Zeitung in late autumn 1842. So far, Bauer's novella has never been used as a potential source to shed light on the deeper causes of animosity between Marx and die Freien. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cambridge University raised the status of Political Economy in the mid-nineteenth century, a rise finalised and symbolised by the full-fledged professorship conferred upon Henry Fawcett in 1863. This article sets out a historical description of this rise towards its final phase, by examining economic discourses of academics on the Cambridge network. The central observation is that behind this process was a gradual acceptance of free trade, gradual in the sense that it was not as a sudden reaction to the repeal of the Corn Laws but with the changing portrayal of Ricardo as the economist of rent theory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although he succeeded Say at the College de France as chair in 1833, Pellegrino Rossi is not considered a great economist nor has he been appreciated as an original one. However, his lectures in the College de France inspired a young Ottoman-Greek, Sarantis Archigenes, who wrote a political economy book which discussed the economic problems of the Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. This article provides an account of the traces of Rossi's ideas in the formation of Archigenes' views, with an aim to present Rossi's role in the dissemination of Classical political economic ideas in the Ottoman lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Condy Raguet (1784–1842) was the first Chargé d'Affaires from the United States to Brazil and a conspicuous author of political economy from the 1820s to the early 1840s. He contributed to the era's free-trade doctrine as editor of influential periodicals, most notably The Banner of the Constitution. Before leading the free-trade cause, however, he was poised to negotiate a reciprocity treaty between the United States and Brazil, acting under the authority of Secretary of State and protectionist apostle Henry Clay. Raguet's career and ideas provide a window into the uncertain relationship of reciprocity to the cause of free trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the legitimacy of traditional sexual division of labour receives growing attention from contemporary economists. In particular, a debate takes place between the “New Home Economics”, which stresses the efficiency of the traditional arrangement and economists questioning the justice of the relations between sexes. The same kind of opposition appears between two Victorian economists: J.S. Mill and W.S. Jevons. Although both are utilitarian, they adopt contrary views about the relative importance of efficiency and justice in the definition of appropriate gender relations. While Mill aims at conciliating justice and utility, Jevons considers that utility outweighs justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Passed in 1773, the Spitalfields Acts were the main regulation of the London silk industry. Classical political economy has generally been depicted as one of the main causes of their repeal, occuring in 1824. Recasting the successive interventions of Ricardo, Mill, Bowring and Senior in their respective political context, we show how they exhibit a shift in the discussions, from commercial to industrial issues. After Ricardo and Mill stressed the need to free the trade, Bowring pointed out the superior quality of French products. Senior relied on his work to emphasise the question of copyrights, which dominated his 1841 accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Marx is well known for sharply criticizing the social effects that technical change had on the employment and the working conditions of the labourers. At the same time, he was fascinated by the revolutionary power that technical innovations offered and assigned such innovations to play a prominent role in the development of modern society. We may explore the origin and development of his views in greater detail referring to the whole of his legacy, not only to his writings but also to his numerous excerpts from the technological literature of his time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gustave Fauveau, a French mathematician and economist of the mid-nineteenth century, presented in 1864 an innovative theory of taxation that has been largely overlooked by historians of economic thought. He provides a mathematical framework for the analysis of taxation, considered both as the counterpart of the benefits received from the State and of the taxpayer's ability to pay. This article examines Fauveau's contribution to fiscal theory. This consists of modelling his two major ideas: as the first author to apply insurance theory to the calculation of an equitable tax, and expressing in mathematical terms Condorcet's principles of taxation. The novelty of his analysis lies in proving, in both cases, the optimality of progressive or of proportional taxation. To give a complete overview of Fauveau's ideas on fiscal theory we present in an appendix two other contributions on taxation that were published separately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a commonly accepted view that the parity theory of forward exchange based on the law of one price was first formulated by Keynes. In this article we assess the preliminary shapes of the interest parity (IP) relation. After reviewing the early beginnings of the IP relation, we investigate two French economists of the mid-nineteenth century who have hitherto received no adequate attention. We argue that Bonnet and Juglar ought to be considered pioneers in the assessment of IP relation since Goschen's contribution is related to the specificity of 'long' exchange rates at a bimetallic time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]