Being the President of a society such as this is a position that brings with it relatively few benefits. One very definite benefit it does confer, however, is the opportunity to address one's peers on a subject of one's choice, for an indefinite period of time, and with no fear of contradiction; no referees, no discussants, and not even any questions from the audience. I intend to make use of this unconstrained state by being somewhat more speculative in my remarks than I could otherwise be.

Historians of economic thought typically have seen little or no connection between William Stanley Jevons's economic theory and policy issues. Wesley C. Mitchell, for example, suggested that Jevons had little interest in politics and was uncertain on the questions of the day. He was “basically interested in the subject [of economics] as a science and not as a means of bettering economic organization” (Mitchell 1969, pp. 31, 101-2). Mitchell's comments are curious in view of Jevons's extensive writings on public issues. His book, The State in Relation to Labour (1882), is considered a classic on the subject of policy and a rationalization for interventionist government. Jevons's pronouncement that “we can lay down no hard and fast rules, but must treat every case upon its merits” may well have marked the end of the “liberal era of principles,” according to F. A. Hayek (Hutchison 1978, pp. 100-101). Certainly Jevons intended as much.

John Richard Hicks is famous for the contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare economics that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1972 and for his interpretation of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory (1936). Hicks made these pathbreaking contributions to economic modeling in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. Following Axel Leijonhufvud's classification (1984, p. 28), these are the works of “Hicks the Younger.” “Hicks the Elder” formulated “Some Questions of Time in Economics” (Hicks 1976). There he refers to theories that adequately incorporate aspects of time as “economic theory in time” in contrast to “economic theory out of time.” Hicks argues that for the theory of capital and the theory of markets this distinction is of greatest importance (ibid., p. 139).

The equation of exchange is identified with the name Irving Fisher. Although it is not the quantity theory, a point often made by him, it is the core organizing ingredient for his subsequent quantity theoretic analyses. It has in fact been argued that the quantity theory was central to Fisher's work, that “his fundamental premise and basis for all other analysis and policy prescription was this: money matters and matters most, [that he indeed was] the first of the modern ‘monetarists’” (Allen 1977, p. 563).

Modern Austrian economists employ the Austrian Theory of Capital as an analytical construct with which to interpret policy-induced business cycles and suggest an appropriate remedy. The argument is that the structure of production, particularly the degree of capital intensity or “length of the production period” among different sectors of a non-collectivized economy, depends on the level of interest rates. Low interest rates encourage greater capital intensity in production while high interest rates reduce the degree of capital intensity or roundaboutness. Thus a greater capital intensity encouraged by an artificially low rate of interest created by a central bank's credit inflation must be followed by increased unemployment of labor when interest rates rise again to reflect the ensuing price inflation and the credit inflation stops. Restraint on central bank credit creation is thus prescribed as the remedy for fluctuations in output and employment in the business cycle.

The idea of value-free economics is an old methodological issue. It has given rise to one of the most important controversies in the history of economic thought. The discussion was important because it had to do with the scientific nature of economics. One can still find a significant number of methodological works (e.g. Coddington 1972, Gordon 1977, Samuels 1977, Sugden 1981, Colander 1994) which echo this old controversy. Most economists today, though, would agree that the claim of an economic theory free from values is essential in establishing the scientific nature of the discipline. A positive, value-free economics, in the sense of not relying on any particular set of value judgments or on any philosophical or psychological framework, is generally seen as the ideal. This approach has crucially influenced important branches of economics such as microeconomic theory. The current established position was a product of a historical process which played a significant role in the formation of the body of economic theory. Furthermore, the idea of what is value-free economics has changed since its first introduction as a scientific ideal. The nature of this change is also important for understanding the present conception of the scientific character of economics.

Between 1873 and 1875 two anonymous pamphlets were published in London with intriguingly similar titles. They were: (A) A Few Remarks upon Certain Practical Questions of Political Economy, 1873; 2d ed., 1873; 3d ed., 1874; and (B) A Few Remarks on Professor Cairnes' Recent Contribution to Political Economy, 1875. Both were published by Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., Stationers' Hall Court, and both carried on their title pages the statement “By a Former Member of the Political Economy Club.” The identity of the author or authors has not hitherto been established, but it now appears that John Cazenove (1788-1879) was certainly the author of (A), and most probably the author of (B).