In the history of economic thought Walter Eucken is mostly known for his impact in establishing the Social Market Economy in post-war Germany. Even though there is a growing interest in his ideas especially from an Austrian and a Constitutional Economics perspective, his influence on the...

Rawls, desde muy joven, estuvo interesado por los principios normativos del pensamien­to económico moderno, y más específicamente su teoría del bienestar. Esta inquietud no sorprende. En primer lugar, a Rawls siempre le preocuparon la pobreza y la injusticia social, temas ampliamente...

I examine two competing proposals for reforming and reviving confidence in the international monetary regime. Robert Triffin introduced and championed the proposal for centralized reserves. Fritz Machlup championed the proposal for flexible rates originally introduced by Milton Friedman. Triffin...

Philosophers of science and philosophers of economics have recently 'rediscovered' the problem of idealisation. In this paper a taxonomy of different kinds of idealising procedures is applied to Pareto's views on the status of economics among the social sciences. THe paper aims to show that the...

William Grampp’s JPE article on Adam Smith is creative and provocative. It errs, however, by disparaging the invisible hand’s importance as a symbol of various economic processes that help societies prosper in ways that individuals neither intend nor comprehend. Four specific...

In Swedish public debate, economists have been more influential than any other category of social scientists. We examine the views of five great Swedish economists on the role of the university economist in the public arena. What did they say about scholarly objectivity and value judgements,...

Peter Bauer was a pioneer in development economics and his contributions to the field have been vindicated by the collapse of central planning. Through most of his career, however, Bauer was marginalized by the economics profession. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, economists frequently...

The following pages offer a contribution to the understanding of Keynes’s débuts as an economist, in the hope we might dissipate a few myths, some created by Keynes himself, others by disciples or adversaries. Following some preliminary remarks on these misunderstandings, we will recall how...

Trygve Haavelmo spent the academic year 1938/39 at the University of Aarhus as a teacher in statistics. He would immediately after his Aarhus stay leave for the United States, where he completed The Probability Approach in Econometrics (1944) and later worked at the Cowles Commission before...