Firstly, for anyone new to the journal can you briefly explain the journal’s mission and scope?

The Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET) is the journal of the History of Economics Society and it promotes interest in and inquiry into the history of economics and related parts of intellectual history, facilitate communication and discourse among scholars and disseminate knowledge about the history of economics. The journal is also deeply committed to fostering long-run efforts aiming at both curbing the ingrained patterns of exclusion and inequalities in academia and publishing high quality research independently of who or where it is produced.

We aim at keeping high quality scholarship and conversation on all topics in the history of economics and economic thought (HET) from across methodological approaches, fields, languages and geographical locations. We believe JHET can play a pivotal role in bringing together scholars interested in HET, fostering interactions and communication and promoting diversity in topics, scholarship and scholars.

What makes JHET stand out from other journals in the field?

JHET is a scholarly publication of international distinction and one of the leading journals in the field of the history of economics because of its openness to the full spectrum of scholarly analysis within the history of economic thought and history of economic methodology. The submitted papers receive a high-quality and speedy refereeing process that substantially improves the research done, and the excellent research outputs are featured in the journal’s pages.

In the last couple of years we have strived to promote diversity and inclusion with other actions besides producing a journal that publishes some of the best research in the field. We have sponsored online writing workshops open to any scholar and especially to young scholars, independently if they will or have submitted or published their work in the journal. We hope these online writing workshops offer a space where scholars can connect, practice and understand the tools of the trade of writing. We have also tried to keep conversations going and bring them to the attention of the scholarly community through our Virtual Issues that assemble published papers in a given topic online, introduced by a short text about the general findings. The Meet the JHET Authors video-series has also been a way for us to bring published papers to a broader audience, give the authors the opportunity to present their work in a more informal manner, and make audience and authors closer because we can associate a face to the articles and know a little more about the authors’ research. And, we are very excited with the new book review advisory board that will also allow us to have more connections with other fields and other languages.

What can we look forward to from the last issue of the year?

The December 2021 issue brings some exciting features. It contains five research articles covering a wide range of topics, from development economics in India to German economic thought, John Stuart Mill and American economic thought in the Progressive Era.

We are also very proud to have a symposium celebrating the centenary of John Maynard Keynes’s Treatise on Probability, organized by Bradley Bateman, with three contributions in addition to Bateman’s introduction.

The volume closes with nine very interesting book reviews, including books aimed at a broader readership, as it is the case of Robert Shiller’s Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.

The issue is already out so we’d encourage readers to have a look, read, and make an opinion for themselves.

The JHET Meet the author video series continues to grow. What will readers learn from the short videos?

This short-video series features the research of authors who published in JHET some exciting papers. The authors are invited to briefly present their papers and tell us how it fits with the authors’ research agendas. Once again the wide range of themes that are typical of JHET are present in the video series. One will find videos about Antonio de Vitti de Marco and his engagements with the US president Woodrow Wilson, or about E. F. Schumacher’s buddhist economics (the author of the best-seller and very significant book Small is Beautiful of 1973), or yet about happiness and behavioral economics, or about John Krutilla and environmental economics. There is also a video on the first economics film produced by Michael Polanyi (the brother of Karl Polanyi) in the late 1930s, and on Paul Samuelson’s textbook, Economics, revised in response to the criticisms that radical economists raised in the late 1960s. And more: on mercantilism; on Léon Walras’s views of the State; on the German economist Wilhelm Krelle who was an officer in the German Army during World War II and modernized economics in Germany afterwards; on the history of Clarence Ayres and institutional economics; and on the symposium in memory of William Barber, a distinguished historian of economics who passed away in 2016.

There is so much to learn from these short videos. We would also welcome suggestions from readers on who they would like to meet next.

Those following JHET on twitter (@jhet_journal) will have seen the exciting news about the book review section. Can you tell us more?

With the great help of the JHET Book Review Editor, Catherine Herfeld, JHET is proud to announce that it now has a Book Advisory Board, with twenty-five members. The Board will help the Book Review Editor in extending our scope of expertise regarding the selection of books for review. First, we aim at reviewing more books that cover research areas beyond the history of economics to also include neighbouring fields, such as history of science, science studies, methodology of economics, sociology of science, economic history, etc. Second, we aim at reviewing books in all those areas that are written within different language communities apart from the English language community. Finally, we aim at covering books written about topics and/or in geographical regions beyond the Western world. All members of the book review advisory board will advise and support us in finding books for review and thereby help us to achieve those aims over the next couple of years.

Discover more about JHET by visiting the journal homepage.