Mandeville and Hume advance similar framings for their political economy, using emergentist and proto-sociological lines of analysis. They are less aligned with liberalism (political, economic, or metaphysical) than mercantilism, insofar as they favor balance-of-trade arguments and urbanization. They are both methodological holists, not individualists. It is the group, not individual agents, that figures at the core of their thought.

The paper uses the data from François Quesnay's writings to derive a social table for pre-revolutionary France and estimate the level and distribution of income. It formalizes Quesnay’s thinking about the process of production and situates it within the modern national accounting framework. Quesnay’s estimates are compared with some contemporary and recent estimates of eighteenth-century French incomes and inequality.

John Stuart Mill’s Fourth Fundamental Proposition Respecting Capital, first stated in 1848, had become an enigma well before the nineteenth century had come to an end. Never challenged in Mill’s own lifetime and described in 1876 as “the best test of a sound economist,” it has become a statement that not only fails to find others in agreement, but fails even to find an internally consistent interpretation that would make clear why Mill found it of such fundamental importance. Yet the fourth proposition should be easily understood as a continuation of the general glut debate. Economists led by Malthus had argued that demand deficiency was the cause of recession and a body of unproductive consumers was needed to raise the level of demand if everyone who wished to work was to find employment. Mill’s answer was that to buy goods and services would not increase employment, or, in Mill’s own words, “demand for commodities is not demand for labour.”

While federal financial rescues have become a common response to crises, the federal provision of finance was not one of the original powers of the federal government. One man, Eugene Meyer, is largely responsible for the origin of federal financial rescues, through both the War Finance Corporation and Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Meyer learned laissez-faire economics from William Graham Sumner at Yale. However, German economist Adolph Wagner’s state-socialism philosophy heavily influenced Meyer’s thinking, and Meyer developed an interventionist philosophy. Serving in key government positions, Meyer put his beliefs into practice. These channels of influence and the resulting policies are examined.

The paper argues that Terence Hutchison’s (1981) argument that the young F. A. Hayek maintained a methodological position markedly similar to that of Ludwig von Mises fails to support the relevant conclusion. The first problem with Hutchison’s argument is that it is not clear exactly what conclusion he meant to establish. Mises (in)famously maintained a rather extreme methodological apriorism. However, the concept of a priori knowledge that emerges from Hayek’s epistemology as implied in his work on theoretical psychology is the opposite of Mises’s treatment of a priori knowledge. Thus, it cannot be maintained—if, indeed, Hutchison meant to establish—that Hayek was a Misesian apriorist during the years in question. What’s more, the paper shows that Hutchison’s argument does not support a weaker interpretation of the relevant conclusion. There are alternative interpretations of Hutchison’s evidence, more charitable and more consistent with Hayek’s epistemology, which undermine Hutchison’s conclusion.

We argue that Fritz Machlup’s (1995) interpretation of Mises’s epistemology is at least as, if not more, plausible than Murray N. Rothbard’s (1957) interpretation. The implications of Machlup’s interpretation of Mises and of Austrian epistemology affect Austrians and non-Austrians in their academic interaction. Machlup’s interpretation shows that Austrian epistemology is well grounded in post-Popperian epistemology and that most criticisms of Austrian economics based on its aprioristic character are misplaced. Furthermore, Machlup’s interpretation provides us with a setting to rebuild the academic interaction between Austrians and non-Austrians that was characteristic of the early twentieth century.