Taking its cue from a well-established tradition of work from history of science studies this book provides a coherent account of why the revolution in macroeconomics was 'Keynesian.'

Various explanations have been put forward as to why the Keynesian Revolution in economics in the 1930s and 1940s took place. Some of these point to the temporal relevance of John Maynard Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), appearing, as it did, just a handful of years after the onset of the Great Depression, whilst others highlight the importance of more anecdotal evidence, such as Keynes’s close relations with the Cambridge ‘Circus’, a group of able, young Cambridge economists who dissected and assisted Keynes in developing crucial ideas in the years leading up to the General Theory. However, no systematic effort has been made to bring together these and other factors to examine them from a sociology of science perspective. This book fills this gap by taking its cue from a well-established tradition of work from history of science studies devoted to identifying the intellectual, technical, institutional, psychological and financial factors which help to explain why certain research schools are successful and why others fail. This approach, it turns out, provides a coherent account of why the revolution in macroeconomics was ‘Keynesian’ and why, on a related note, Keynes was able to see off contemporary competitor theorists, notably Friedrich von Hayek and Michal Kalecki.

This book examines the origins of the IS-LM model, one of the most significant innovations in the history of economic thought. It shows that the complete IS-LM model, including the equations and diagram, was produced by a group of economists who contributed their respective mathematical models of Keynes’s General Theory, including Champernowne, Reddaway, Harrod, and Meade, not to mention Hicks. Furthermore, the book discusses the implications of newly discovered archival material, including a previously overlooked document showing that John Maynard Keynes himself was the first to present the IS-LM model equations in a lecture he gave on December 4, 1933. It focuses on the implications of this material in terms of understanding the evolution of Keynes’s approach from 1933 to 1937, later interpreters of his General Theory, and the ongoing debate between Keynesians and Post-Keynesians on the nature of his system. Given the revelations it presents, this book will transform the profession’s understanding of the origins of the IS-LM model and modern macroeconomics.

How scientific is economics? This question has often been framed by analogies and correspondences made between economics and other, seemingly more well-established scientific disciplines, starting with classical mechanics. At the same time economics is likely to be seen in opposition to or in contrast with history, where the reliance upon generalizing rules, thought experiments, and model construction in economics is set against the amassing of particular facts intended to create narratives in history. In this new volume, Turk explores the relationship between economics and history, including the often fraught one between economics and economic history, making the case that economics does in fact require the proper grounding in history that has so often been ignored. This work challenges the attempt to link economics with other, more clearly ‘scientific’ disciplines as flawed and fundamentally wrongheaded. A key element of this book is its examination of the gaps and associations that exist in, or are seen through, linkages with thermodynamics, classical mechanics , biology, literature, mathematics, philosophy, and sociology. This exploration is frequently undertaken through study of the work of one or more major figures in the history of economic thought, ranging from Quesnay and Smith, through Walras and Max Weber, to Robinson, Krugman, David, and Arthur. Through the possibility of an alternative to the gaps noted in each such comparison, the underlying, necessary connection between economics and history can be brought out. The book concludes by exploring the basis for the positive construction of a historical economics. This book is suited for those who study history of economic thought and philosophy of economics.

The purpose of this book is to describe the intellectual process by which Real Business Cycle models were developed. The approach taken focuses on the core elements in the development of RBC models: (i) building blocks, (ii) catalysts, and (iii) meta-syntheses. This is done by detailed examination of all available unpublished variorum drafts of the key papers in the RBC story, so as to determine the origins of the ideas. The analysis of the process their discovery is then set out followed by explanations of the evolution and dissemination of the models, from first generation papers through full blown research programs. This is supplemented by interviews and correspondence with the individuals who were at the center of the development of RBC models, such as Kydland, Prescott, Long, Plosser, King, Lucas and Barro, among others. This book gets stright to the heart of the debates surrounding RBC models and as such contributes to a real assessment of their impact on modern macroeconomics. The volume, therefore, will interest all scholars looking at macroeconomics as well as historians of economic thought more generally.

The concept of economic rationality is important for the historical evolution of Economics as a scientific discipline. The common idea about this concept -even between economists- is that it has a unique meaning which is universally accepted. This new volume argues that "economic rationality" is not not a universal concept with one single meaning, and that it in fact has different, if not conflicting, interpretations in the evolution of discourse on economics. In order to achieve this, the book traces the historical evolution of the concept of economic rationality from Adam Smith to the present, taking in thinkers from Mill to Friedman, and encompassing approaches from neoclassical to behavioural economics. The book charts this history in order to reveal important instances of conceptual transformation of the meaning of economic rationality. In doing so, it presents a uniquely detailed study of the historical change of the many faces of the homo oeconomicus .

This volume is the first full-length biography of Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), the most famous French classical economist. During his lifetime Say actively took part in three revolutions: the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the establishment of economics as an academic discipline. He struggled with Bonaparte, was the owner of a cotton spinning mill, and published his famous Treatise of political economy and many other economic writings.

This edited collection uses a history of economic thought perspective to explore the evolving role of Latin America within the context of globalization. In particular, it examines the region’s resilience in the face of the global financial crisis. Economic Development and Global Crisis explains that Latin America is a region with distinct characteristics and peculiarities which have been shaped from the colonial era up to the present day. The contributions suggest that several features which were perceived as economic backwardness have turned out to be advantageous, and this may explain why Latin America is withstanding the crisis much better than Europe, Japan and the USA. This book will be of interest to scholars working in the areas of economic development, economic history, the history of economic thought and Latin American studies.

Is it possible to generate "capitalist spirit" in a society, where cultural, economic and political conditions did not unfold into an industrial revolution, and consequently into an advanced industrial-capitalist formation? This is exactly what some prominent public intellectuals in the late Ottoman Empire tried to achieve as a developmental strategy; long before Max Weber defined the notion of capitalist spirit as the main motive behind the development of capitalism. This book demonstrates how and why Ottoman reformists adapted (English and French) economic theory to the Ottoman institutional setting and popularized it to cultivate bourgeois values in the public sphere as a developmental strategy. It also reveals the imminent results of these efforts by presenting examples of how bourgeois values permeated into all spheres of socio-cultural life, from family life to literature, in the late Ottoman Empire. The text examines how the interplay between Western European economic theories and the traditional Muslim economic cultural setting paved the way for a new synthesis of a Muslim-capitalist value system; shedding light on the emergence of capitalism—as a cultural and an economic system—and the social transformation it created in a non-Western, and more specifically, in the Muslim Middle Eastern institutional setting. This book will be of great interest to scholars of modern Middle Eastern history, economic history, and the history of economic thought.

The years in-between the two World Wars were a crucial period for the building of economic dynamics as an autonomous field. Different competing research programs arose at international level. Great progress was achieved by studies on the business cycle, with the first statistical applications. Outside the theory of the business cycle, a significant line of inquiry was that pursued at the end of the 1930s by Hicks and Samuelson. This period also saw the formulation of another approach to formal economic dynamics which in the 1930s represented the frontier of research from the analytical point of view. It was an approach which set the notion of equilibrium at the basis of dynamics, exactly as in the case of statics, thus leading to the definition of a dynamic equilibrium approach. The aim of this volume is to take into consideration this original research field sparked from Pareto’s works and initially developed during the 1920s in the United States by two American mathematicians, G. Evans and C. Ross. In the 1930s, the concept of dynamic equilibrium became the main research field of the Pareto school which gave its most important contributions in this field. The Paretian economists as Amoroso, de Pietri Tonelli, Sensini, and the younger, such as Bordin, Palomba, La Volpe, Fossati and Zaccagnini, for the most part students of the former, developed this approach in many directions. The theory of dynamic equilibrium reached remarkable results from an analytical viewpoint through the wide application of the functional calculus, thus anticipating a perspective which was taken into consideration in the 1960s with the theory of optimal growth. Despite the Pareto school’s relevance, it remained widely unknown, not only at international level, but also in Italy. Recently, it has been object of renewed interest. This present work aims at reconstructing the fundamental contributions offered by the Pareto school in forming the economic dynamics theory.