In 2009, the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (EJHET) and the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) launched the initiative to publish a special annual issue of EJHET with a selection of papers presented at the ESHET conference of the year before. In the thirteenth year of this collaboration, the result is one more time a special issue that testifies to the shared commitment of the society and the journal in disseminating a panel of original research in the History of Economic Thought.
The 24th annual ESHET conference took place at the University of National and World Economy (UNWE) at Sofia, Bulgaria, from 8 to 10 October 2021. It had originally been scheduled to happen there from 28 to 30 May 2020. At that time, however, the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic swept the world, and the conference had to be postponed. Since a large number of papers had been submitted and selected for presentation, it was decided to produce a “virtual” conference issue nevertheless. A selection of papers was published after the usual procedures of evaluation in the December 2021 issue of EJHET (see volume 28, issue 6 of this journal). During the editorial process that issue carried the project name “virtual Sofia”, or “Sofia I”.
The present issue (of December 2022) has accordingly been dubbed “real Sofia” or “Sofia II”. It contains a number of papers that were presented when the ESHET conference finally materialised at the UNWE in 2021. The general conference theme was “Development and Underdevelopment in the History of Economic Thought”, but the sessions covered a much wider range of topics. Many of them were organised in a hybrid set-up – partly on the ground, partly online – since the ongoing pandemic hindered many participants from travelling to Sofia. The organisers faced considerable logistic challenges in these arrangements, but they met them well. Most of the participants felt that such mixed interaction was an important step in the return to normality.
The first contribution to the present issue is the presidential address, given by Richard van den Berg under the title “‘Esclave né de quiconque l’achète’ - The multiple histories of economic texts”. In his function as ESHET president (in the period 2020–2022), van den Berg points out that doing history of economic thought can mean many different things which he groups under the questions how a text was made, what it was made for, what it was used for, and what use is the text to us still. He gives numerous “classical” examples for the relevance and variety of implications in these questions which he deems to be greater than the diversity of methods employed in answering them. Van den Berg’s conclusion is that “for the history of economic thought to retain its vitality and remain a field of study that is intellectually serious, and open and pluriform, we need all these perspectives addressed”.
The presidential address is followed by eight articles, the first six of which are arranged in a roughly chronological order of their subjects, from the late 18th century until the mid-20th century. They cover a large range of topics, whereas the last two articles deal more specifically with developments in micro- and macroeconomics in the 1920s and 1930s. They can be seen as leading up to the issue of microfoundations for macroeconomics which is one of the points discussed at the roundtable on monetary non-neutrality and stabilisation policies (on which more below).
The first article carries the title “Justice and charity: the role of Aristotelianism and Anglicanism in Edmund Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity” and it is written by Ioannes P. Chountis. The article is a case study of the influences of philosophical and religious thought on political and economic thinking in the 18th century. During his long parliamentary career between 1762 and 1794, Burke developed not only his well-known political ideas, but also lesser known propositions on economic affairs. Chountis examines these through the lense of the tract “Thoughts and Details on Scarcity”, to find out under which conditions Burke approved of state intervention in markets and what role he reserved for charity.
Next is Anton Galeev who sets the focus on “Yuli Zhukovsky’s contribution to Russian debates on economic development of the 1860s and 1870s”. Galeev portrays Zhukovsky as a self-taught economist who was not an academic, but an astute observer and critic of the political reforms for Russia’s economic modernisation, in particular the “Emancipation reform” of 1861 by which serfdom was formally abolished. Galeev describes how various influences from Western European economic thinking shaped Zhukovky’s eclectic views on economic development, which centred were on productivity growth, and how these views set him apart from the contemporaneous mainstream of economic thinking in Russia.
Moving from Russia to North America and from development theory to monetary theory, we have the article on “Irving Fisher, Simon Newcomb, and their plans to stabilise the dollar”, contributed by Sofia Valeonti and Robert Dimand. The authors argue that Fisher’s manifold praise of Newcomb as a precursor of his own famous formulation of the equation of exchange is misleading insofar as the differences between his approach to the quantity theory of money and that of Newcomb are substantial. They stem from their roots in the different traditions of the Currency School and the Banking School. Valeonti and Dimand show that Newcomb applied the quantity theory only to the short run and only to inconvertible paper currency, whereas Fisher believed the quantity theory to hold both in the short and the long run, and generally also under a metallic standard. They stress nevertheless that, even if the theoretical underpinnings and the specific constructions in the plans of Newcomb and Fisher differed, the two shared the basic idea to use a tabular standard of value for stabilising the purchasing power of money.
The history of monetary economics is relatively well covered in the literature, in particular with regard to proposals to protect the health of the monetary and financial system. The same cannot be said of economic thinking about protecting the physical and mental wellness of people; there is not much literature on the history of health economics. Guido Erreygers and Philip Clarke fill a gap by drawing attention to “Edgar Sydenstricker, a pioneer of health economics” who worked for the U.S. Public Health Service, the League of Nations and the Milbank Memorial Fund between 1915 and 1935. Their portrait of the elder brother of Pearl S. Buck, the famous author, describes how Sydenstricker contributed to the development of health economics by collecting empirical evidence on the links between health and the socioeconomic environment, and by developing ideas for health insurance and the evaluation of public health interventions. Clarke and Erreygers give an account of Sydenstricker’s concept of equivalence scales for comparisons between different households and other aspects of his research methodology. They thereby place Sydenstricker’s work in a wider context of the history of applied economics.
The world is currently going through crises that provoke fundamental reconsiderations of the transformational dynamics in the relations between capitalism and democracy. The situation resembles in various aspects the state of the world economy and politics in the 1930s and 1940s, when many prominent books were written about system change. Two of them were Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942) and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944). In their article on “Polanyi and Schumpeter: transitional processes via societal spheres”, Johanna Rath, Theresa Hager and Ines Heck compare the “transformational-historical” approach of Polanyi with the “evolutionary-analytical” approach of Schumpeter. They emphasise that, apart from their common Austro-Hungarian background, the two thinkers shared visions of transitional processes, in which the economic sphere triggers change in the sociocultural and the political spheres which in turn feeds back to the economic sphere. Rath, Hager und Heck juxtapose the notions of rationalisation and commodification that play – with some difference – key roles in Schumpeter’s and Polanyi’s accounts of the driving forces of societal change. They also discuss the differences that bring Polanyi to offer a historically conditioned explanation of the rise of fascism in Europe, and Schumpeter to see an inherent tendency in capitalism to transform itself into socialism.
A different evolutionary perspective is taken in Alessandro Le Donne’s contribution which sports the title “Economic theory and philosophical anthropology: Marx, Gramsci, Sraffa and the study of human nature”. Le Donne proceeds from the question of whether it is possible to replace the methodological individualism epitomised by the neoclassical concept of homo oeconomicus by integrating Piero Sraffa’s analytical reconstruction of the Classical theory of value and distribution with a “satisfying theory of human behaviour and social change”. Focussing on the concept of causality, he uses Marxian anthropology and Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis to interpret the equations of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities as the “core” of an open system in which the evolution of historical, social, and legal conditions is conceptualised in a non-deterministic fashion. He concludes that individual agency and interaction can be conceived in accordance with the Sraffian reappraisal of Classical political economy.
At the core of the neoclassical system is the concept of utility. Yet, its measurability has always been a controversial subject, mostly in arguments about ordinality versus cardinality. In her article, Amélie Fiévet steps “On the shoulders of giants: from Lange (1934) to Samuelson (1938) on the ‘unique’ measure of utility”, to study how Samuelson interpreted cardinality as a separate cognitive ability in reaction to Lange who considered it to be a continuation of ordinality. He formally proved the consistency between utility indices related to situations and those related to changes from one situation to another. Yet, as Fiévet emphasises, while Samuelson set out the conditions under which Lange’s demonstration of cardinality is valid, he rejected it nevertheless on grounds of cognitive insufficiency.
Last among the selected articles is “Rupture and continuity in the original divide between microdynamics and macrodynamics”, written by Vincent Carret. The point of departure is “Propagation Problems and Impulse Problems in Dynamic Economics”, Ragnar Frisch’s contribution to the Festschrift for Gustav Cassel published in 1933. Attempting to develop a distinct methodology for the analysis of business cycles, Frisch characterised pre-existing dynamic theory as “micro-dynamic analysis” in contrast to his own approach which he called “macro-dynamic” – probably the earliest use of a term that within short time gave rise to the notion of “macroeconomics” as a subdiscipline distinct from standard “price theory”, later called microeconomics. Carret argues that Frisch’s micro-macro dichotomy “created a narrative hiding what had been done” in dynamic theory during the 1920s and early 1930s. He gives an account of cobweb models and models with intertemporal optimisation, two approaches to which Jan Tinbergen had contributed before he was converted to working on macrodynamics. Carret frames the underlying question whether movements of the economy in the aggregate can be explained in terms of intertemporal optimisation as having been above all a division between mathematical tools: maximisation at the individual level, Newtonian dynamics and macroeconometrics at the aggregate level.
Carret’s article is followed by the verbatim records of a roundtable discussion, which took place during the ESHET conference in Sofia, about a highly prominent and controversial attempt to eliminate the divide between microdynamics and macrodynamics. Fifty years have passed since Robert E. Lucas published his paper on “Expectations and the Neutrality of Money”. It started a movement that changed the professional standards of doing macroeconomics. It arguably also affected the perception, if not the conduct of monetary policy and other stabilisation policies. The roundtable discussion on “Monetary non-neutrality and stabilisation policies 50 years after Lucas’s ‘Expectations’ paper” collects comments from a panel of experts in a combination of prominent macroeconomists who have gathered ample experience of work in central banks and other authorities, and historians of economics. The panellists are Olivier Blanchard, Beatrice Cherrier, David Laidler and Athanasios Orphanides. The discussion was prepared and moderated by Pierrick Clerc, the transcript has been edited by Hans-Michael Trautwein.
The final piece in this special issue is an obituary for Axel Leijonhufvud who passed away in May 2022. He was not only an outstanding thinker, well known for his reinterpretation of Keynes and as an untiring critic of mainstream thinking in macroeconomics. He was also an inspiring and generous person, and – last but not least – an honorary member of ESHET.
At the end of the introduction to this special issue, we would like to thank all the referees for having contributed anonymously, with competence and efficiency, to the selection of the papers and the improvement of their quality.