The Coase theorem has occupied a prominent place in economic discourse for the last half-century. The debate over the theorem and the uses to which it has been put are important moments in the history of modern economics, and the analysis of them by the historians of economics sheds light on certain of the tensions in contemporary historiography. This article discusses several aspects of the intellectual history of the Coase theorem, arguing that the study of this history illustrates the necessity of a pluralistic approach, and that attempts to write history from a singular historiographic perspective leave us with histories that are both misleading and incomplete.

This essay serves as the introduction to the authors’ translation of Karl Knies’ essay “Die nationaloekonomische Lehre vom Werth” (1855). Knies is one of the acknowledged founders of the Older German Historical School, and yet in recent years several writers have described his 1855 essay as seminal in the evolution of marginal utility analysis. The authors examine how Knies develops his nascent theory of marginal reasoning in his essay, arguing that rather than cling to his earlier historicist programmatic, Knies attempts to discover general laws; however, not by strict causal analysis but by a typical ‘German art’ of taxonomy and classification that resembles juridical argumentations. This results in an ambiguous text, which influenced several marginalist pioneers who studied under Knies at Heidelberg (including Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser, and John Bates Clark), as well as several members of the Younger German Historical School (including Gustav von Schmoller).

This paper examines the use of the medical metaphor in the early theories of crises. It first considers the borrowing of medical terminology and generic references to disease, which, notwithstanding their relatively trivial character, illustrate how crises were originally conceived as disturbances (often of a political nature) to a naturally healthy system. Then it shows how a more specific metaphor, the fever of speculation, shifted the emphasis by treating prosperity as the diseased phase, to which crises are a remedy. The metaphor of the epidemic spreading of the disease introduced the theme of the cumulative character of both upswing and downswing, while the similitude with intermittent fevers accounted for the recurring nature of crises. Finally, the paper examines how the medical reflections on the causality of diseases contributed to the epistemology of crises theory, and reflects on the metaphysical shift accompanying the transition from the theories of crises to the theories of cycles.