I attended the now famous conferences at Sussex in 1968 and Nottingham in 1969 that preceded the later founding of both the History of Economic Thought Society in the UK and the History of Economics Society (HES) in North America. In 1969, I also helped to found the UK Money Study Group at its first conference in Hove, while in 1970 I was at Karl Brunner’s first Konstanz Seminar. In both fields, these conferences were followed by many, many more. At that time new specialist journals were also appearing. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (JMCB), where I had a paper in the second issue, started life in 1969. So did History of Political Economy (HOPE), but there I had nothing to submit. Ironically, given Lionel Robbins’s still notorious attack on this proposed journal at Sussex, to which I shall return below, my first completed research paper in history of economic thought (HET)—on Thomas Tooke (Laidler 1972)—was already committed to his forthcoming Festschrift.

This paper aims at understanding social practices and institutions that ensured the transnational diffusion, recognition, and renewal of the research program in the General Equilibrium Theory (GET), in spite of multiple critics and apparent theoretical dead ends. First, we trace the main conceptual developments of the Walrasian GET program since the 1950s and thus elaborate on its intellectual identity. Then, based on a systematic study of the educational and professional trajectories typical for several generations of GET scholars, we analyze a social form taken by this transnational and multidisciplinary “scientific community”: an institutional dynamics of the Walrasian GET program, most common career patterns, and the forms of international and intergenerational transmission. We construct a database of GET theorists and apply to this dataset a technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) in order to investigate the relational patterns between attribution of scientific credit (symbolic capital) and biographical properties in a transnational space of the GET scholars.

Though the Chicago school has been the subject of no small amount of research over the past several decades, that scholarship has focused largely on persons, ideas, and influence—in short, on the school itself. No attention has been paid to the origins of that label and the avenues via which the notion of a “Chicago school” of economics came to be. This paper attempts to address that lacuna, drawing on both published and archival resources. What emerges is a story of a label of uncertain origin but wrapped up in competing agendas, the first stage in the history of which culminates in 1962 with its rejection by two of the very people who helped birth it.

In the Bretton Woods era the controversy over cross-border use of national monies turned on how to create ‘symmetries’ and avoid significant ‘asymmetries’ in the way national currencies shared specific international currency functions. We examine the twentieth-century work of prominent economists on the nature, choice, and functions of international currencies. Prescriptive approaches to international currency formation are considered, beginning with the discussion of the Bretton Woods plans, followed by doctrinal developments stimulated by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. Why are those developments instructive, given recent revisitation of the currency internationalization question in modern international monetary thought and policy? The modern revival of this question resembles a rehabilitation and restatement of earlier controversies, though it underestimates the gradual encroachment of the idea of international currency competition. This idea came to dominate other doctrines from the 1970s; it accommodates the ongoing adaptation of national currencies to the full range of international currency functions.

When scholars investigate the legacy of John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability (1921) for the development of Keynes’s thinking, the attention usually focuses on the connections among Keynes’s probability theory, his conception of decision-making under uncertainty, and the theory of the functioning of the macroeconomic system that derives from it—through the marginal efficiency of capital, the preference for liquidity, and the self-referential functioning of financial markets. By contrast, this paper aims to investigate the connections between Keynes’s probability theory, on the one hand, and his economic policy recommendations, on the other. It concentrates on the policy recommendations defended by Keynes during the Great Depression but also after the General Theory. Keynes’s economic policy can be understood as a framework for decision-making in situations of uncertainty: fiscal policy aims to induce private agents to change their “rational” probability statements, while monetary policy aims to allow more weight to these statements.

E. E. Slutsky's enduring but enigmatic fame as an economist far outweighs the limited understanding of most interested scholars as to his very productive life and unusually wide range of research interests. To begin to compensate for this deficit a previousJHET article entitled “E.E. Slutsky: Mathematical Statistician, Economist, and Political Economist?” provided some biographical information on Slutsky's life, together with an account of a few of his little-known contributions to political economy (see Barnett, 2004b). In this current article the inception and immediate influence of Slutsky's two most famous papers in economics written in 1915 and 1927 are considered directly, in addition to further discussion of relevant aspects of Slutsky's life and times. The full significance of the content of the two groundbreaking papers will not be discussed in detail, as this has been adequately covered elsewhere (see for example Barnett 2006, Weber 1999, and Klein 1999). Rather, an attempt will be made to provide a historical and intellectual context for Slutsky's two most important contributions in economics, given that the circumstances surrounding their composition are not sufficiently well known among economists in the West.

William Petty (1623–87)—medical doctor, Oxford professor of anatomy, Gresham College professor, surveyor of Ireland for the Cromwellian Protectorate, Fellow of the College of Physicians, founding member of The Royal Society, and inventor of political arithmetic—is now most particularly remembered for his contributions to the formation of political economy. When Petty left Ireland for the last time in 1685 and returned to London, he took with him a very large collection of unpublished papers and correspondence. These largely remained in the property of his descendants—together with some important later additions—until 1993, when they were sold to The British Library. Petty's collected, published economic writings were edited and republished a century ago, together with some other materials (Hull 1899). In the 1920s Petty's descendant, the sixth Marquis of Lansdowne (H.E.W. Petty-Fitzmaurice), published two collections of manuscripts from what by then had become known as “The Petty Papers” archive (Lansdowne 1927, 1928). All these volumes have subsequently been republished in facsimile a number of times.

In The Ultimate Resource (1981, 1996), and in many other publications over the last several decades, Julian Simon put forth controversial views regarding the connection between natural resource scarcity, population growth, and economic progress. Simon argued, in contrast to those espousing the limits to growth, that natural resources were not getting scarcer, but more abundant, and that a large and growing population was an asset rather than a liability in the pursuit of economic growth.

A century ago Arthur Pigou published The Economics of Welfare. Within this volume are a few lines relating to the pricing of traffic congestion. Over the years, these lines have attracted the attention and thoughts of some of the leading economists of their day. These have included Knight, Clapham, and Robertson in the 1920s; Kahn and Viner in the 1930s; Ellis and Fellner in the 1940s; and Buchanan, Vickrey, Solow, Friedman, Walters, Demsetz, Newbery, and Allais in the post-World War II period. Here, I look at the academic arguments from the 1920s concerning how roads should be priced and by whom. I then move to consider the continuation of the intellectual debates after World War II and their implications for policy design and implementation. Finally, I briefly look at the extent to which some of the existing road congestion pricing systems meet the requirements of the economic theory.