The papers prepared for this symposium cover a great deal of ground. It is a pleasure to be able to respond to them, as this provides an opportunity to try to clarify some of the aims of my book (Woodford 2003) that may have been insufficiently clear in the original work. But I shall have to restrict my attention to only a few of the most important issues raised in the various papers. I shall consider three classes of issues in particular: the methodology adopted in the book, the role of “cashless” models, and the connection between my work and the Wicksellian tradition.

In his Journal of the History of Economic Thought article, “A Suggestion for Clarifying the Study of Dissent in Economics,” Roger Backhouse usefully proposed some terminological clarifications with respect to studying the ideas of disagreement, controversy, and dissent in (Western) economic discourse, heterodoxy being defined as a more narrow category than dissent. Backhouse also wrote that “the ideas on which Marxist, Radical, and Post Keynesian economics are based were arguably never widely held” (Backhouse 2004, p. 265).

When I was studying the history of economic thought at the University of Melbourne in 1959 I was extremely fortunate to have Graham Tucker as my tutor. Tucker was Reader in Economic History in Melbourne during the second half of the 1960s and then became Professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. Taciturn, understated, and droll, Tucker was a wonderful teacher who inspired a deep interest in the history of economics in all those who came under his influence. He was responsible for provoking my interest in Herbert Somerton Foxwell, although at the time it was more one of curiosity about a man who was in many ways an enigma.

Roger Backhouse (Backhouse 2004) has provided both an insightful deconstruction of dissent and a suggested terminology to deal with subtle distinctions within the domain of dissent, especially regarding the status of heterodoxy. There is more to be said, largely in expansion of his analyses—placing his analyses in a larger context. Section I summarizes Backhouse's position and Section II presents my own thoughts.

The Malthusian population doctrine formed an integral part of both theory and policy in classical economics: “[T]he Malthusian theory lent support to the subsistence theory of wages and prepared the way for the Ricardian preoccupation with the land-using bias of economic progress; by explaining poverty in terms of a simple race between population and the means of subsistence, it provided the touchstone for all classical thinking about economic policy” (Blaug 1997, p. 65). Among historians of economic thought there is probably little in this statement with which to disagree. A variety of interpretations, however, have been given to the subsequent career of the population doctrine, including its place in the economics of Alfred Marshall. Economists after John Stuart Mill, Joseph Schumpeter argued, found the population doctrine to be of little theoretical use to economics: many leading economists of the neoclassical school, including Alfred Marshall, “paid their respects to it, even though they no longer based upon it any part of their analytic structures” (1954, p. 890). Mark Blaug, by contrast, suggests that the analysis of population in Marshall's Principles of Economics indicates an “orthodox classical attitude to population problems” (1997, p. 385). Yet another perspective is offered by John Whitaker who remarks that early in his career Marshall resolved to transform the “old political economy into a new science of economics, open to the progressive intellectual and social movements of the day.” His intent was to leave behind the sterile controversies and pessimistic pronouncements of the old political economy, including those associated with the population doctrine (1996, vol. 1, pp. xvii, xx).

In my note on dissent (2004), I emphasized that heterodoxy and dissent had to be defined socially. Given that crucial elements of the social context differ from one society to another, it follows that the meaning and significance of dissent may vary too. Barnett (2006) has pointed out a conclusion I should have drawn explicitly: that my suggestions for thinking about dissent make sense only in Western economics. In the former Soviet Union, as he points out, dissent in economics could not be understood apart from the political situation. The examples he cites illustrate some of the ways in which dissent in Soviet economics differed from that in the West, where there was no officially sanctioned orthodoxy comparable to Marxism-Leninism (or rather to what the Soviet authorities chose to call by that name) from which economists wished either safely to signal their dissent or to which they wished, despite their dissent, to be seen to adhere. We see here, it might be argued, a simple difference between two types of society.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman's work is never done and often not counted. It is a fact equally universally acknowledged that most people in the economics profession are not terribly interested in such a fact. It is my purpose to explore this lack of interest by tracing it to the place of sexual division of labor in Adam Smith's work.

Constitutional economics examines the individual's choice-between-rules rather than their choice-within-rules. It is, according to James M. Buchanan, a restatement of the classical political economy of Adam Smith. One of its primary normative implications is the need for a fiscal constitution. Given the late eighteenth century intellectual basis for such fiscal constitutions it appears, at first glance, a little strange that the research program does not consider Edmund Burke's 1780 economic constitution worthy of consideration. The most obvious reason for Burke's exclusion from constitutional political economy is that the methodological basis of Buchanan's twentieth century constitutional economics seems almost the polar opposite of Burke's eighteenth century legislator's attempt to introduce a fiscal constitution. However, both methodologies suffer from internal inconsistency in their cases for a fiscal constitution. One of the primary reasons for this inconsistency is that each needs to appeal to ideas more at home in the methodology of the other. Buchanan adapts a quasi-Burke approach by the introduction of ethical norms not consistent with the self-interest postulate, while Burke adopts a quasi-Buchanan approach by appealing to the principle of consent to justify his reform of institutions that have been formed by custom and tradition. Ultimately, the methodological difference is not as great as it appears at first. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Burke's work deserves recognition in the broader constitutional economics research program because to exclude him on the grounds of methodology is to fail to understand the logical implications of Buchanan's work.