Classical economists - mainly Smith, Ricardo and J.S. Mill - abhorred public debts because of their interference with capital accumulation. J.S. Mill in particular envisaged that a rising public debt leads to higher interest rates and falling real wages, a combination which may be consistent...

Harriet Taylor has been long forgotten as an economist and political philosopher, while merely remembered as John Stuart Mill’s friend and belatedly wife. Never was fate more unjust: we only need to recall that Taylor - whose liberal background soon led her to be fascinated by socialist...

Recent historiography on the interest of Italian economists in American economic thought is becoming rich and valuable. Thanks to these sources, we know that this interest arose because several Italian economists were attracted by the realism featured in North American economic investigation, by...

In 1975 the Publisher Mazzotta printed the two volumes of the Italian edition of the treaty of political economy, which had been published in provisional versions since 1963 and in definitive form in 1973. About thirty Chinese economists joined He Xu of the Chinese Popular University in his...

Facts, theories, and policies can be considered as the vertices of a triangle. While many contributions explore along the edges of such triangle, between couples of poles, we claim that the history of economics thought is fundamentally interested in looking within the whole area of the triangle....

It is not so much known that before being a famous demographer Landry first contributed to political economy. Several scholars such as Edmund Malinvaud emphasized that it is not in doubt that Landry "revealed himself as a gifted theoretician". Supporting this view, the objective of this paper is...

The introduction of new technology may have significant effects on the level of employment and the real wage rate; effects that have received considerable attention even from the economic thinkers of the classical period. This paper aims to analyze and evaluate the various views and arguments of...

The mainstream classical theory of interest was part of the theory of profit as I have shown (Gootzeit 2006). The clearer separation of interest from profit took place gradually during the 19th century and even into the 20th. Turgot’s early role in this process has not been recognized. His...

Giacinto Dragonetti è l’autore di un piccolo libro, Delle virtù e de’ premi (1766) che associato al più celebre Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) di Cesare Beccaria, ebbe un significa- tivo successo nell’Europa dei lumi pre-rivoluzionaria. Il libro è costruito attorno all’idea che alle...

The role played by economists and thus economic theory in implementing the Spanish economic policy during the second half of the 20th century is the main topic analysed in this article. Political framework indeed is crucial for understanding the relationships between Spanish economists and...