As with most papers written for occasions of this kind, this one has elements of self-indulgence. In this Society, at least, one has a captive audience, some (or most?) of whom may have come for another purpose. At the same time, one has no prescribed theme: if one had one, one organised last year's meeting around it. True, there are constraints: it is after all the History of Economics Society, which constrains the subject somewhat–but only a little; it is an after dinner speech at the end of two long days of meetings, which limits the heaviness of the contents; and it will appear in the Bulletin, which prevents complete absurdities. Yet these constraints are fairly minimal.

Matters are not very much improved when we come to the historian who qualifies all this [oversimplification of Luther] by some such phrase as that “Luther, however, was of an essentially medieval cast of mind;” for this parenthetical homage to research is precisely the vice and the delusion of the whig historian.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History

The relationship of the Virginia School of public finance to several important topics in the history of economic thought has attracted much recent attention. Barry Baysinger and Robert Tollison (1980), for instance, view William Ewart Gladstone's fiscal policies as an attempt to create a tax constitution to restrain a revenue-maximizing government. This position is in keeping with the evolving normative taxation principles of the Virginia School (see especially Brennan and Buchanan 1980). Charles Leathers (1986), on the other hand, argues that Gladstonian finance emphasized expenditure constraints, not constitutional tax constraints. Elias Khalil (1987) meanwhile, contrasts James Buchanan's methodological individualism with the “nonseparable” approach of Sir James Steuart (1767), which led Steuart to approve of a large degree of state intervention in the economy. While these essays either find past policies that conform to Virginia School principles or else find past economic theorists with sharply different approaches, they have not noted a striking anticipation of Buchanan's view of public debts by Antonine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836).

In several reviews of my Classical Economics (1987; henceforth CE) a criticism recurs relating to my proposition that distribution in Ricardian economics is dependent upon the pattern of final demand. Anthony Brewer, who is convinced by the demonstration in the book of ‘a fundamentally important core of general equilibrium economics accounting for resource allocation in terms of the rationing function of relative prices,’ has stated the objection fairly and his formulation invites and deserves a response:

I argue for an aesthetic criterion of truth through the explication of the epistemologies of Adam Smith and Albert Einstein–the progenitors of modern economics and physics [cf. Skinner, 1979:ch. 2; Holton, 1968, 1979]. The aesthetic criterion supersedes objectivist and relativist epistemologies.

The Winternitz Solution, which is generally regarded as a receding landmark in the long and still expanding literature on the transformation problem, deserves a closer scrutiny than it has received so far. While the mainstream professional viewpoint regards the Winternitz solution merely as a special case of the general conditions stated in Seton's seminal 1957 article, many students of the history of economic thought in the English speaking world receive their first and often only introduction to the transformation problem from the pages of Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect (hereafter ETR-i where i = 1, 2,3,4 denotes the four successive editions of this book). Although Winternitz does not lay out the full economic implications of his solution–presumably because he felt these were of limited mathematical interest, the treatment in Blaug is seriously misleading. Our purpose here is to provide a complete presentation of the Winternitz Solution (Part I) and subsequently to give a critique of Blaug's treatment (Part II).

In 1954 the American Economic Association held its first session on “The International Flow of Economic Ideas.” As a discussant, the great scholar of Walras, William Jafft said, “The Iron and Bamboo Curtains of today were preceded three-quarters of a century ago by nationalistic, linguistic, and other curtains–all impending the free flow of ideas in the learned world,” (1955, 38–9). A.W. Coats later added some other obstacles, “…the unavailability of modern information retrieval methods, or perhaps a plain ornery human unwillingness to cooperate or personal dislike, all have at times been impediments to the progress of knowledge,” (1987, 66).

Perhaps the most notorious choice of words ever made by an economist was the pair of mathematical terms used by Malthus to describe the maximum possible rates of increase in population and subsistence: “geometric” to describe population growth, and “arithmetic” to describe the growth of subsistence. If Malthus could have foreseen the linguistic and logical difficulties entailed by the geometric-arithmetic distinction, he might have looked for different adjectives. But what a loss to the “bravura” style of the Essay on Population so admired by Keynes! Consider the rhetorical impact of: “Population tends to increase at an exponential rate higher than the rate at which the food supply increases.” Is this the language of an economic classic?

The publication of the New Palgrave has spawned many reviews of the 1,916 entries within the 4.3 million words in the four-volume epic. I will continue to sample entries and to revise my own class notes as well as to encourage students to use parts of the volume. I have collected many of the reviews and listed them at the end of this modest note.