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This volume includes referred articles, archival pieces, and book reviews. The first section deals with economics and Anti-Semitism and focuses on the contribution of four leading economists: Werner Sombart; Thorstein Veblen; Maffeo Pantaleoni and the Italian corporatist Gino Arias. The second section comprises articles on several subjects: the notion of Pareto optimality; the Ordo-Liberal conception of competition, Pavel Illich Popov's "The Balance of the National Economy of the USSR," and Keynes's German edition of the General theory. The archival section includes the English translation of a series of articles by Bertil Ohlin on the Great Depression.

This paper provides a reconstruction of the debate on "social value" among early marginalists in the US. This will be done in three steps. The first step analyzes John B. Clark's approach to social value as presented in his Distribution of Wealth; the second step deals with other influential contemporaries who adopted a similar social value perspective, with a main focus on Edwin R. A. Seligman; the third step discusses those critics who, with due differences in emphasis and style, animated the debate over social value, reviewing (among others) the contributions of Herbert J. Davenport, Joseph Schumpeter, Benjamin Anderson, John Maurice Clark, and George P. Watkins. The final section presents some conclusions.

The aim of this article is to investigate in some detail the origins of Frank H. Knight's antipositivism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, the article also attempts to increase our general understanding of the methodological debates taking place during the early decades of the last century and to shed new light on the inherently pluralistic character of US interwar economics. The first section outlines Knight's methodological views as presented in his early works; the second section discusses Knight's "recantation" and his attack on behavioristic social science; the third section analyzes Knight's discussion of the nature and limitations of scientific economics; the fourth section offers a brief digression on Knight's relationship with American institutionalism; the fifth section deals with the later developments of Knight's antipositivism; the final section presents some conclusions.

Albeit concerned with the biological element in social evolution, Albert B. Wolfe was among the very few economists of the progressive era who openly expressed their concerns about certain implications of eugenic rhetoric for the social science. Specifically, Wolfe questioned the strong hereditary boundaries that more extreme eugenicists suggested about human beings. A careful examination of Wolfe's writings reveals that his reaction was rooted in the belief that many of the social problems that eugenicists attributed to hereditary limitations were actually imputable to the influence that the social, economic, and physical environment exercised on the individuals.

The aim of this paper is to analyze John Bates Clark's influence in the passing of the Clayton and Federal Trade Commission Acts (1914). Specifically, it is argued and documented that Clark was important in this process in two ways. First, he exercised an indirect influence by discussing in academic journals and books problems concerning trusts, combinations, and the necessary measures to preserve the working of competitive markets. At least as importantly, if not more so, Clark took an active role in the reform movement both contributing to draft proposals for the amendment of existing antitrust legislation and providing help and advice during the Congressional debates which led to the passing of the FTC and Clayton Acts.

This article assesses John R. Commons's adoption of Wesley N. Hohfeld's framework of jural opposites and correlatives in order to construct his transactional approach to the study of institutions. Hohfeld's influence on Commons, it is argued, was both positive and negative. On the one hand, Commons followed Hohfeld and recognized that such concepts as property and inheritance actually represent an aggregation of numerous types of legal relations. Hohfeld's schema provided a powerful rhetorical and analytical tool whereby these highly abstract conceptions could be reduced to a limited number of primary elements. Moreover, Hohfeld's schema appeared to be consistent with Commons's general methodological and psychological commitments. On the other hand, Commons's forging of the "transaction" as the elementary unit of economic analysis can be seen as an attempt to go beyond Hohfeld. Commons was in fact unsatisfied with Hohfeld's bilateral treatment of jural relations and with his neglect of the role played by state officials in enforcing transactions and, in so doing, in promoting specific individual interests as collective public policies.

A few years ago, an article by Arnold Heertje and Peter Heemeijer (2002) triggered an articulate and stimulating debate among scholars on the intellectual origins of Paul Samuelson's multiplier-accelerator model (1939a, 1939b). The discussion, which involved the participation of Samuelson himself, centered on whether, and to what extent, Samuelson's 1939 seminal contributions were inspired by Roy Harrod'sThe Trade Cycle(1936). Heertje and Heemeijer argue that "there is little factual support for Samuelson's suggestion ascribing the model mainly to Alvin Hansen, his mentor in the days of the creation of the model" (Heertje and Heemeijer 2002, p. 207). Instead, they provide convincing evidence indicating that it was Roy Harrod who actually played the major role in developing the ideas leading to the multiplier-accelerator interaction. "Theoretically speaking," they assert, "it was Harrod who provided the most important contribution to the model. His interesting 1936 workThe Trade Cyclecontained valuable ideas regarding the combination of the multiplier and accelerator" (p. 217).

Largely forgotten today, Albert Galloway Keller was one of the foremost sociologists of his time. A brilliant scholar and a staunch disciple of William Graham Sumner, Keller spent his entire academic career at Yale, first as a student and then as professor of the Science of Society, the chair formerly held by his mentor. The main coordinates of Keller's sociology are to be found in his major work, Societal Evolution (1915), where he sought to apply Charles Darwin's mechanism of variation, selection, and transmission to Sumner's general scheme. Although Keller gave priority to social variables, his evolutionary sociology retained many elements of the typically Progressive Era preoccupations with heredity and the biological quality of individuals. The aim of this paper is to examine in some detail Keller's views on eugenics and related issues, and to assess whether and to what extent these biologically deterministic elements played a role in his Darwinian approach to institutional change.

Franklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a discussion of Giddings's views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion.

AbstractThis article explores in detail the reactions among American economists to John Bates Clark's famously controversial claim that the marginal productivity theory of factor pricing and distribution is necessarily just. The general debate around Clark's "naïve productivity ethics," as George Stigler sharply called it, transcended the then existing distinctions within the discipline and involved figures of virtually all theoretical and ideological persuasions—from prolabor progressives such as Richard T. Ely to staunch conservatives such as Thomas Nixon Carver. Our reconstruction reveals that, contrary to several standard historical accounts, for American early twentieth-century marginalism, let alone American economics at large, Clark's solution to the ethical problem of distributive justice was far more divisive than consolidating.

AbstractWe review the critical phase of Economic Notes focusing on the years from 2012 to 2019 when the Journal suffered from the progressive disengagement by its founder, the Monte dei Paschi di Siena. The main reason for that gradual detachment is identified in the performance difficulties Monte was suffering from. Against the progressive fading away of the support provided by the Bank, the Journal entered a halo of the potential crisis itself. However, soon some measures were taken to allow Economic Notes to develop new and autonomous ways to project its own future. Specifically, we outline how the major changes in the structure of the Editorial Board were conducive to launching a new phase in which the Journal learned to rely more and more on low‐cost ways to gain visibility and attract quality submissions. That new strategy materialized through the widespread adoption of repeated Calls for Papers to generate the consequent Special Issues. The topics selected for the Calls for Papers were selected with a view at themes that were policy‐relevant and, whenever possible, not too far from the potential interest of Monte dei Paschi. We show that those Special Issues were functional to engineer a recovery in the Journal's performance. It was essentially owing to that resumed good health and recovered resonance that when Monte finally abandoned it Economic Notes was by and large equipped for the new venture.