The rise of visual representation in economics textbooks after WWII is one of the main features of contemporary economics. In this paper, we argue that this development has been preceded by a no less significant rise of visual representation in the larger literature devoted to social and...

In this paper, we show that Paul Samuelson (1915-2009), renowned as one of the main advocates of the mathematization of economics, has also contributed to the change of the place of visual representation in the discipline. In his early works (e.g. Foundations of Economic Analysis published in...

The rise of visual representation in economics textbooks after WWII is one of the main features of contemporary economics. In this paper, we argue that this development has been preceded by a no less significant rise of visual representation in the larger literature devoted to social and...

Over the past two decades, numerous contributions to the history of economics have tried to assess Paul Samuelson's political positioning by tracing it in the subsequent editions of his famous textbook Economics. This literature, however, has provided no consensus about the location of...

This is a unique account of the role played by 58 figures and diagrams commonly used in economic theory. These cover a large part of mainstream economic analysis, both microeconomics and macroeconomics and also general equilibrium theory.

Paul Samuelson proposed and practiced a program for the Whig history of economics. One such example is his account of Frank Ramsey's contribution to optimal taxation in 1927. For him and mainly for the public finance economists who rediscovered later Ramsey's contribution, Ramsey was a genius...

Present-day macroeconomics has sometimes been dubbed ‘the new neoclassical synthesis', suggesting that it constitutes a reincarnation of the neoclassical synthesis of the 1950s. This paper assesses this understanding. To this end, we examine the contents of the ‘old' and the ‘new'...

Although economists have recognized long ago that "time enters into all economic questions", the ways they treated and modeled time has varied substantially in the last century. While in the 1930s there was a distinctive Cambridge tradition against discounting utilities of future generations, to...

Frank Plumpton Ramsey (b.: Feb. 22, 1903; d.: Jan. 19, 1930) was a Cambridge mathematician who made important contributions not only to philosophy, mathematics, logic, and probability, but also to economics with two major works published in 1927 and 1928 in the Economic Journal, which became popular...