This study examines the political economy of international trade and perpetual peace proposed by the agronomist Jean-Baptiste Rougier-Labergerie under the French Directory. Drawing on Rougier-Labergerie’s treatise on commerce and peace, this article shows how a political economy that was rooted in natural jurisprudence navigated the challenges of subsistence and war through turbulent times that extended beyond the Thermidor. Similar to eighteenth-century intellectuals who witnessed large-scale wars waged with public debt in the name of national interest, Rougier-Labergerie considered the possibility of peace and prosperity to be intricately linked to the question of commercial rivalry between nations. He thereby recognized the pressing need to mitigate—by different means from those deployed by the radicals of Year II—the jealousy of trade that plagued Europe in the 1790s. This examination provides a more nuanced dimension to the established categories in historical inquiries into the international political economy of the revolutionary period.

From the 1960s, the rising volatility of financial markets in the US troubled econometricians and bank managers alike. Both found it increasingly difficult to forecast savings deposit flows. This article explores these challenges by focusing on two developments. First, it analyzes the adjustment process among econometric models of the savings deposit market. I combine the analysis of the FMP model used by the Fed since 1970 and the deposit model of the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society (PSFS), thereby pioneering the historical analysis of econometric models built by private financial institutions. I find that economists failed to discover timeless determinants for deposit flows. Second, I explore how the conditions of the savings deposit market shaped the demand for macroeconomic forecast models, using the PSFS as a case study. I show that while the rising volatility led bank managers to seek sophisticated tools to predict deposit flows, the deregulation of the banking industry put the forecasting quality of macroeconomic models for individual banks to the test.

The visibility of Karl Marx in England had a “major breakthrough” according to Kirk Willis (1977): the publication of the first volume of Das Kapital in English in 1887. Although Willis provides a quantitative description of mentions of Marx based on library records, book circulation statistics, and newspaper references, the attribution of the effect of Marx’s visibility to a single event remains a simplification of a complex process. The specificities of late Victorian society and the fact that Marx wrote his theoretical works in German contributed to his near anonymity in England up to the second half of the 1880s. The liberal radical roots of the left-wing intellectuals and of the working class movements, together with the strong parliamentary tradition, constituted a challenging environment for the spread of Marx’s name. With data from Google Ngram, this study adopts the synthetic control method and finds that 1886 is a breakthrough year for the mentions of Marx in England. This is combined with a qualitative analysis of primary and secondary sources and of the contextual nature of the interest in Marx in several literary genres. The paper complements Willis’s study by shedding light on the developments preceding 1887. In this period the surge of interest in Marx was driven by a growing fear of socialism and his mentions shift from partly generic to distinctly political. This shift was triggered by a combination of factors, including the economic crisis and rising unemployment of the mid-1880s, episodes of social unrest, key editorial developments, and the efforts of Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx, and many others in promoting the socialist cause. These conditions broadened public perceptions of socialist imminence and contributed to the semiotic diffusion of Marx’s name even before 1887.

This paper invites reflection on the nature and role of visual illustration in economics, through a historical account of the “Hayekian triangle,” a graphical representation devised by Friedrich A. Hayek to depict the structure of production and introduced in his 1931 book Prices and Production. Tracing its origins back to Hayek’s earlier “schemes” in 1929, the paper then examines the triangle’s evolution and its applications in visualizing economic phenomena such as capital accumulation and business cycles. The paper also highlights key developments by contemporaries and successors, such as Evan F. M. Durbin, Murray N. Rothbard, and Roger W. Garrison, as well as more recent formalizations that integrate mathematical precision.

Several recent works have explored Wassily Leontief’s distinction between standard econometrics, which he called “indirect statistical inference,” and a “direct induction” he called “direct observation.” These works usually understand Leontief’s direct induction through the lens of input-output analysis. I argue that this is too narrow a perspective. Instead, I show how this distinction stemmed from Leontief’s (1929, 1932a) econometric work, when he developed a statistical technique for determining supply and demand curves. From lesser-known published texts by Leontief from this period, as well as unpublished material from the archives, it appears that Leontief’s distinction was in part borrowed from Jacob Marschak (1931) when they were both in Germany. Like Marschak, Leontief distinguished between two epistemic strategies: indirect, using data from the marketplace, i.e., price-quantity data; or direct, using specific data separately on buyers (e.g., household surveys) and on sellers (e.g., plant surveys). This result fundamentally revises our understanding of Leontief’s view of econometrics.

We compare Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, and Knut Wicksell on the relation of family size to poverty, considering their (1) views on Thomas Robert Malthus, (2) contributions to statistical studies of population and standards of living, and (3) theories of poverty. While they shared the conclusion that to reduce poverty required decreasing the family sizes of the poor and working classes, they diverged on how this should be accomplished. Marshall rejected the use of contraceptives and argued that family limitation should arise from delayed marriage and restraint within marriage. Pareto thought such recommendations unscientific and unrealistic. Statistically, it was clear that people practiced preventative checks to varying degrees across countries and across classes; privately, Pareto supported the use of birth control as a responsible choice. Wicksell took the most radical position, publicly advocating for legal contraceptives and sex education for everyone regardless of class or marital status. We show how their working out of the problem of poverty subsumed additional questions of positive and normative science and the role and status of moral judgment in policy. Their discussion of the public interest in private reproductive choices reflects many of the same tensions that characterize contemporary discussions, indicating the continuing relevancy of the topic.

Although economic knowledge constitutes a central element of political governing, people have divergent opinions about its nature and whether it can or should be accessible to everyone. This paper examines the contested role of economic knowledge in Sweden during the Enlightenment, focusing on the philosophical and political contributions of Anders Chydenius (1729–1803). Chydenius published several works and pamphlets on economic matters in the 1760s, the last of which led to his dismissal from the Swedish Diet in 1766. What made this work so politically provocative? I argue that its notoriety stemmed from two key claims: he likened basic economic principles to natural laws, which because of their simplicity all politicians were able to understand, and he believed in making these principles widely available in society. He also acknowledged that different social classes had conflicting interests in monetary policy, contending that, from a national economic perspective, the interests of traders, manufacturers, and workers were more important than those of the aristocratic elite. This perspective not only challenged the established political order but also raised questions about the neutrality and the role of the public in discussions about economic knowledge.

The literature on internal commitment cites Adam Smith as a precursor because of his elaboration of diachronic control, and this has given rise to attempts to model his account. Some of these efforts stress the role he assigns to the “general rules of morality” by which the “bulk of mankind” ensure the constancy of their conduct, and interpret them as self-enforcing resolutions. But how could such internal tactics as adopted by weak agents be effective? How could the knowledge of general rules escape self-deception? We take a closer look at what Smith writes about beliefs and emotional dispositions regarding the important rules of morality.