Adam Smith advanced a radically different analysis of the dynamics of international monetary flows than his good friend David Hume, and placed it at the heart of his analysis of banks and money. Smith's analysis of banks and international flows of money and credit was an important element in his intellectual assault on the British commercial conceptions and colonial policies of his day. It let him argue that an outflow of specie would boost British economic growth. Exactly the opposite of the stimulating inflows of money emphasised by his contemporaries. Did Smith's argument gain adherents? We systematic searched for references to Smith's discussion of bank notes and a growth boosting outflow of specie from 1776 to Britain's departure from the gold standard in 1797. We find that those authors who clearly recognised and reproduced Smith's argument thought that it did not apply to their time and place. They accepted the logic of his analysis but they thought that the economy they inhabited had already displaced far too much specie to support the volume of paper money in circulation.
Is economics fragmented or concentrated? This debate arguably cannot be resolved by focusing solely on the persistence of "neoclassical" assumptions. A clearer image emerges when disciplinary unity is understood methodologically as a shared ordering principle linking theory, empirics, and normativity. The post-war methodological basic type, centred on universal axiomatic theory, has clearly lost its unifying force. In its place, model-portfolio, identification-first, and performative-normative orientations coexist today and produce epistemic and performative paradoxes. Hence, methodological fragmentation can be diagnosed. The discipline thereby appears in a transitional state necessitating a more reflexive methodological framework to coordinate forms and usages of knowledge.
This rejoinder responds briefly to the points raised by Ambrosino, Cedrini, and Davis' "Reply to Heisse". I summarise points of agreement and substantive disagreement, before clarifying my position against the authors' reconstruction.
This article makes the case for a social history of economic thought that repositions HET within history rather than as a subsidiary of economics. It argues that economic ideas are not self-contained doctrines but historically situated interventions shaped by institutions, power relations, and struggles over authority. Combining Skinnerian contextualism with Bourdieu's field theory, it offers a framework for analysing how ideas circulate across academic, expert, political, and public arenas. Two case studies-corporatist economics under Vichy and the rise of financial modelling-show how this approach opens a new historiographical agenda and redefines what it means to study economics historically.
Mises is best known for his development of praxeology and his axiomatic approach to rationality. This article shows that his early work is characterised by a more historical and institutional account of rationality, including his seminal contribution about economic calculation under socialism. This early work considered rationality to be an outgrowth of the development of capitalist institutions, (economic) accounting methods, and what Max Weber called 'instrumental rationality.' We then trace how Mises early formulation of rationality transformed into the praxeological formulation, while highlighting how he retained important elements of his earlier positions in his arguments on socialism and capital theory.
This study compares Friedrich List's political economy with post-Keynesianism. First, I present the salient commonalities between their theoretical and meta-theoretical presuppositions. Second, I identify the affinities between their trade theories. Third, conceptually distinguishing the nation from the state, I show that List's political economy is nation-centric, demonstrating that national culture and national identity play a significant role in economic development, while post-Keynesian economics pays little attention to them, despite its meta-theoretical affinities with List's political economy. Finally, we conclude that integrating List's political economy into the post-Keynesian framework may facilitate the development of a more realistic economic theory.
The Dorfman-Steiner condition is a classic result in the theory of the firm, formulated by Robert Dorfman and Peter Steiner in 1954. It characterises the optimal level of advertising budget chosen by a firm that can set both its price and advertising budget. In this paper, I revisit their article, first showing that this condition is only one among several derived by them. I then place the article within the broader history of the theory of the firm. Finally, I show that it must also be read in light of the contemporaneous debates over the role of algebra in economics.
The present paper reflects about Michael Woodford's Interest & Prices, 20 years after its publication. After stressing the three most important achievements of that treatise, it is argued that Woodford pursued a different, and much less recognised, objective: promoting an approach to monetary policy involving an explicit commitment to a "history-dependent" policy rule. Possible reasons why neither prominent authors nor central banks have (thus far) endorsed that approach are investigated.
