In the 1870s and 1880s, the scientist, logician, and pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce possessed an advanced knowledge of mathematical economics, having mastered and criticized Cournot as early as 1871. In 1884 he engaged in a multi-round debate with the editors of The Nation over the...

Although Cournot's mathematical economics was generally neglected until the mid- 1870s, he was taken up and carefully studied by the Scientific Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts even before his "discovery" by Walras and Jevons. The episode is reconstructed from fragmentary manuscripts of the...