Joan Robinson’s infatuation with Mao’s China remains the most controversial episode of the Cambridge economist’s life. Drawing on the literatures on observation in science and economics, and economists’ travels, we aim at overcoming the dichotomy between Robinson as a ‘political...

The paper presents the history of the contribution of two American economists to a radical cause: the establishment of a socialist and politically united Africa. The setting is 1960s Ghana which under Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led the country to independence from British colonial rule, emerged...

Austrian economist Ludwig Mises’s central role in the socialist calculation debates has been consensually acknowledged since the early 1920s. Yet, only recently, Nemeth, O’Neill, Uebel, and others have drawn particular attention to Mises’s pertinent encounter with one of the most colorful...

Oskar Lange's 1938 article "The Rate of Interest and the Optimum Propensity to Consume", is usually associated with the original IS-LM approach of the late 1930s. However, Lange's article was not only an attempt to illuminate Keynes's main innovations but the first part of a wide project that...

The paper discusses Evsey Domar's role as a link between economics in the West and in Russia. The Russian heritage he brought with him from Harbin (Manchuria) to the US consisted of an interest in socialism and Russian history. He paid close attention to the 1947 Varga controversy in the USSR....

The present paper revisits the path by which Coase came to set down the result now generally known as the Coase theorem in his 1960 article. I draw on both the published record and archival resources in an effort to clear away some of the mist and, as it will emerge, dispel some of the...

My paper reconstructs the path of German economist Friedrich A. Lutz (1901−1975) to American economics. The correspondence with his former teacherWalter Eucken, the founder of the Freiburg School, constitutes a crucial and yet unexplored source for the paper. Through Lutz's case, I demonstrate...

Simon Kuznets was born and educated in Russia and the Soviet Ukraine. He completed his economic education and adopted his research methodology in the United States where Wesley Mitchell was a major influence during his early career. Though scarred by the trauma of displacement, eviction, and...

F.A Hayek is one of the most important and influential advocates of liberalism in the 20th century. His theory is famously based on the concept of spontaneous order, an order emerging from the interaction of individuals without central control and appears critical of every form of...

This working paper - like its companion, Caldwell and Klausinger 2021 - grew out of the authors' joint work on Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950 (Caldwell and Klausinger 2022) and it contains material supplementing it. This paper draws to a large extent on Friedrich Hayek's own investigations into the...