[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models,...

Given the renewed interest in negative interest rates as method for removing the floor to nominal interest rates, this article offers a concise review of Gesell's life, work and its place in the history of economic thought. It provides a brief biographical sketch of Gesell, demonstrating both...

This paper takes off from Jan Kregel's paper "Shylock and Hamlet, or Are There Bulls and Bears in the Circuit?" (1986), which aimed to remedy shortcomings in most expositions of the "circuit approach". While some "circuitistes" have rejected John Maynard Keynes's liquidity preference theory,...

Mark Blaug brought his usual standards of historical awareness and respect for empirical content to bear when he wrote about the Quantity Theory of Money, but he hesitated to probe too deeply into the political and ideological elements of its history, perhaps leading him to underestimate their...

This paper revisits Keynes's liquidity preference theory as it evolved from the Treatise on Money to The General Theory and after, with a view of assessing the theory's ongoing relevance and applicability to issues of both monetary theory and policy. Contrary to the neoclassical "special case"...

This paper resolves a long-running debate in the economics literature – the debate over Smith's theory of money and banking – and thereby revolutionizes current understanding about the history and evolution of monetary analysis. Smith did not present either the real-bills theory or a...

In 1912 Guillermo Subercaseaux (1872-1959), a professor of economics at the University of Chile, published El Papel Moneda, translated into French in 1920 as Le Papier-Monnaie. Subercaseaux's book was reviewed in North-American and European economic journals, and was regarded by Knut Wicksell...

In trying to assess the content and significance of Keynes's attempted revolution in economic methodology, historians have almost exclusively focused on the "General Theory". By highlighting the legacy of the "Treatise on Probability" for Keynes's economic writings, this paper provides evidence...

In the modern lexicon, money is pure instrumentality, a colorless medium that transparently expresses real value. Contrary to that trope, however, we can get “inside” money: we can reconnoiter it as a structure entailing value that is engineered by certain societies. Taking a...

Hayek's evolving thought on gold and the gold standard is complex and, at times, confusing. Hayek initially supported the gold standard and paid special attention to those nations whose central banking policies he viewed as relatively loose. Early on he viewed attempts at stabilization of...