The early Methodenstreit (1871–1883) between Gustav Schmoller and Carl Menger is one of the defining moments in the development of today’s discipline of economics. However, recent interpretations of the debate no longer identify a substantial point of controversy. I reconstruct the debate to show that the pivotal topic was the scope of economics. Menger claims that his marginalist Principles of Economics more or less captures the entire subject matter of the discipline, which Schmoller denies. I also discuss recent scholarship, which follows Friedrich Hayek to situate Menger at the edges or even outside the marginalist mainstream. I show that support for this reading is weak and in parts based on a misrepresentation of the available sources, putting into question Menger’s status as a forbear of today’s Austrian school.

For Adam Smith, a crime is not the result of a rational calculation of loss and gain but the consequence of envy and a vain desire to parade wealth to attract the approbation of others, combined with a natural systematic bias in overestimating the probability of success. Similarly, Smith does not conceive of legal sanctions as a rational deterrent but as deriving from the feeling of resentment. While the prevailing approach of the eighteenth century is a rational explanation of crime and a utilitarian use of punishment, Adam Smith instead builds his theory of criminal behavior and legal prosecution consistently on the sentiments. A well-functioning legal system is thus an unintended consequence of our desire to bring justice to the individual person, not the result of a rational calculation to promote the public good, just like a well-functioning economic system is the unintended consequence of our desire to better our own condition, not the result of a rational calculation to promote public good.

Luxury has always been an intrinsic part of world history, but the words “luxe” or “luxury” in the conventional sense are quite new, entering the French and English languages only in the seventeenth century. It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that the core of this phenomenon came up for discussion in Europe against a backdrop of development of international trade and incipient economic growth. During these debates, the concept of luxury was gradually demoralized by economic liberalism. Translations played a seminal role in the defining of the concept of luxury. European thinkers coordinated their positions even if they disagreed with each other. How was the notion of luxury conceptualized outside the European Roman world? Russia is an interesting example that helps to understand it. The article answers when and why the concept of luxury entered Russian political thought and why luxury, although finding itself outside the bounds of morality, continued to be only condemned in the economic sphere.

Milton Friedman is usually presented as an economist characterized by his empirical approach to economics. His binary classification of economics into positive means and normative ends relies on the empirical content of predictions. Throughout his career, he used extensive, data-based statistical techniques. While important scholarly attention has been devoted to Friedman’s academic and political trajectories, his methodological prescriptions, and the development of economics at the University of Chicago, we know much less about the interplay of these elements. This paper proposes an intertwined reading of them. My aim is threefold. First, to understand Friedman’s work and methodological choices, I relate his empirical approach to his early training in statistics. Second, I articulate Friedman’s understanding of economics as an empirical policy science in the process of building the image of economists as neutral advisers in the policy-making process. Third, I claim that Friedman’s empirical methodological framework, developed while he was in the Economics Department of the University of Chicago, established the guidelines for an institutional long-term project that shaped it.

Ragnar Frisch’s famous “rocking horse” model has been the object of much praise and even controversy since its publication in 1933. This paper offers a new simulation of the model to show that there exist cyclical trajectories in the propagation mechanism. By building an analytical solution taking the same form as Frisch’s original solution, we can provide new insights into the ideas encapsulated in his model, in particular the fact that the author constructed a model combining cycles and growth. The exploration of Frisch’s formal construction of the model leads us to link his statistical work on the decomposition of time series with his economic insights on investment cycles, which both led to the 1933 model. We contrast Frisch’s approach to that of other econometricians who used similar equations, showing that their different mathematical solutions were the product of what they wanted to show with their models.

This article proposes a historical assessment of harmonic analysis of business cycles and its ability to both decompose and build cycles, as received at the Moscow Conjuncture Institute. It traces how the Fourier transform arrived at the Institute, mediated by Henry L. Moore, in the works and actions of Albert Vainshtein, Nikolai Chetverikov, and Nikolai Kondratiev, ultimately leading to Eugen Slutsky’s well-known 1927 article “The Summation of Random Causes as the Source of Cyclic Processes.” Although the evidence does not warrant the assumption that there was an orchestrated effort at the Institute to push forward a research agenda on harmonic analysis of business cycles, it certainly unfolded as more than the summation of random events and individual incursions. Moreover, the Institute as a whole could have produced much more on this matter if it had escaped Stalinist oppression for at least a few more years.

The following is a transcription of a 2019 conversation with Duke historian E. Roy Weintraub about his intellectual development over the 1980s from mathematician to economist to historian. The conversation also explored Weintraub’s early and continuing attempts to forge new ways to study the history of contemporary economics, and the role of science studies in providing a natural language for such explorations. A French translation has already been published in the journal Zilsel: Science, technique, société.