This paper analyses the foundation of utilitarian ethics and theory of probability in the works of Francis Y. Edgeworth. We argue that he pursued an unitary philosophical project, the search for a common epistemological foundation for the social sciences. The common root of the disciplines is...

This paper proposes a general interpretation of Edgworth’s thought based on the recognition of a unitary philosophical project in his contributions to ethics, economics, probability and statistics. This project consists in the search for a common epistemological foundation for the social...

The paper sheds new light on John Bates Clark’s mature position on the “trust” issue. Access to previously unpublished 1911 testimony before the Interstate Commerce Committee of the U.S. Senate, it is shown that, although Clark relied generally on competitive forces to keep monopoly power...

The aim of this paper is to investigate in some detail the origins of Knight’s antipositism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze American economists’ influence in the passing of the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission Acts (1914). Specifically, it is argued and documented that American economists were important in this process in two ways. Many economists exercised an “indirect”...

This paper documents Hohfeld’s influence on interwar American institutionalism. We will mainly focus on three leading figures of the movement: John Rogers Commons, Robert Lee Hale, and John Maurice Clark. They regarded Hohfeld’s contribution on jural relations as a preliminary step toward...

This is a comment on Gintis (2007, 'The Dynamics of General Equilibrium', Economic Journal 117 (523) , 1280–1309), who provides an agent-based model of a Walrasian economy where the tâtonnement is replaced by imitation. His simulations show that the economy converges to the Walrasian...

In a series of recent papers professor Mark Blaug accuses the Formalist Revolution of the 1950s of having greatly damaged economic science by burying the conception of 'competition as a process' in favour of a conception of 'competition as an end-state', incompatible with realistic studies of...

Pierangelo Garegnani has argued that the value capital endowment could have been avoided in Knut Wicksell’s long-period general equilibrium in Value Capital and Rent (1898); the capital endowment might have been specified as an amount of labour embodied in the economy’s stock of capital...

This paper argues that the acceptance of two recent methodological advances in economics, namely game theory and laboratory experimentation, was affected by the history dependence constraining the formalization of economics. After an early period in which the two methods were coolly received by...