This paper deals with the analytical weakness of a number of papers which are published in the journals of history of economic thought. The aim is to highlight the need to combine the historical sensibility with both the logical consistency and the formal rigour of the analysis.

The present paper discusses the ‘battle of methods’ in economics in its epistemic pursuit in the framework of a dialectics between science and art. The traditional distinction between deduction and induction has come to be characterized as a ‘theory-data confrontation’; while the former...

Founded fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society served in its early years to support scholarship and teaching in the history of economic thought. But the decades long removal of history from economics departments and graduate programs has made the Society's mission increasingly...

This text challenges assumptions about the foundations of the Leon Walras' marginalist theory in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. The problematic is approached through a comparative study between Bentham's and Walras' ideas on three focus areas: 1. their views of society and the social...

I argue that economists have reasons internal to the way that evidence works in the sciences to re-discover the importance of the history of their own discipline. For it is a constitutive element of science - here conceived as an ongoing research practice (as opposed to as an explanatory...

This article is the introductory chapter to a festschrift in honour of Geoff Hodgson. In work spanning four decades, Geoff Hodgson has made many path-breaking contributions to institutional economics, evolutionary economics, economic methodology, the history of economic thought and social theory...

This paper incorporates non-classical logic for the analysis of the economy. Especially we study the argumentation in the discussions on free trade. More specifically the opposing positions of Daly and Bahwati

In this essay, I use a general argument about the evidential role of data in ongoing inquiry to show that it is fruitful for economic historians and historians of economics to collaborate more frequently. The shared aim of this collaboration should be to learn from past economic experience in...