Best known as a monetary economist and prominent proponent of monetarism, Karl Brunner was deeply knowledgeable about the philosophy of science and attempted to explicitly integrate logical empiricist thinking, derived in some measure from his engagement with the work of the philosopher Hans...

In this review essay of Medema's and Waterman's collection of some of Samuelson's writings in the history of economics, the author argues that Samuelson's claim to have written "Whig History" is spurious. Moreover the author argues that Samuelson's own writings on modern economics are , whether...

Standard histories of economics usually treat the "marginal revolution" of the midnineteenth century as both supplanting the "classical" economics of Smith and Ricardo and as advancing the idea of economics as a mathematical science. The marginalists - especially Jevons and Walras - viewed...

Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines - e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

The role of first principles in economics is examined through the lens of dominant methodological approaches of the classical and neoclassical periods. First principles are most clearly displayed in pure deductive systems. The tension between first principles as the basis for deductivist...