Poverty was an ubiquitous theme in the literature of the beginning of the 19th century, and its analysis shifted from political or charitable perspectives to embrace a young science, namely the political economy. Stendhal’s example shows how political economy had become the only legitimate...

This paper presents an alternative to both Sraffa’s and his critics’ interpretations of the nature of Ricardo’s search for an ‘invariable measure of value’. It points out that Ricardo recognised two causes of change in the relative values of commodities: (i) changes in the labour...

This paper examines the interaction between education, growth and distribution from a classical-Marxian perspective. It first briefly examines classical-Marxian ideas on the relation between education and growth and income distribution. Drawing on these ideas to the extent that they are relevant...

This paper deals with income distribution in two classical reproduction models in disequilibrium where wages are considered equivalent to the value of a given basket of commodities. These models can be distinguished by the assumption about the distribution of the value of the nonaccumulated part...

The specialists of Pareto's economic and sociological writings, underline that his theory of action is based on a drastic division between logical actions and non-logical ones; the first referring to economic activities and the second to sociological relationships. In this paper, it is shown, on...

Alfred Marshall is most famous for his contribution to the neoclassical thought than to the evolutionary one. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the theoreticallegimacy of the biological metaphor in the writings of Alfred Marshall

This article studies the role of the businessmen in Marshall’s views on the progress towards the social ideal. The analysis is grounded on a perfectionist reappraisal of the Marshallian principle of justice supported by an historical perspective and some of Marshall’s unpublished papers. It...

In developing their pure-exchange equilibrium models, Jevons [1871], Walras [1874–77], and Edgeworth [1881] make use of some version of a law, called law of indifference (or principle of uniformity) by Jevons and Edgeworth and often referred to as the law of one price in connection with...

We study the willingness of some authors, including H. Varian in the 70’s, to elaborate a theory of justice that would fit standard general equilibrium theory in its Pareto’s canonical version. We first show, through an analysis of market socialism in the 30’s, that the Paretian ethic is...

While Jevons is well known for his analysis on pure economics his contributions to a broader conception of welfare including a social aspect has attracted less attention. However, from a history of economic thought perspective, these contributions have a twofold benefit: on the one hand, they...