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I attended the now famous conferences at Sussex in 1968 and Nottingham in 1969 that preceded the later founding of both the History of Economic Thought Society in the UK and the History of Economics Society (HES) in North America. In 1969, I also helped to found the UK Money Study Group at its first conference in Hove, while in 1970 I was at Karl Brunner's first Konstanz Seminar. In both fields, these conferences were followed by many, many more. At that time new specialist journals were also appearing. The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking (JMCB), where I had a paper in the second issue, started life in 1969. So did History of Political Economy (HOPE), but there I had nothing to submit. Ironically, given Lionel Robbins's still notorious attack on this proposed journal at Sussex, to which I shall return below, my first completed research paper in history of economic thought (HET)—on Thomas Tooke (Laidler 1972)—was already committed to his forthcoming Festschrift.

The problems posed by monetary policy cannot be dealt with by legislating enduring policy rules. With the passage of time, economic understanding does not systematically converge ever more closely on a "true" model of the economy, a process which is now sufficiently far along that our current ideas can form the basis for designing such measures. Rather, economic ideas evolve unsteadily and unpredictably and disagreement about them is routine. They influence the behaviour of the economy and they are influenced by it as they develop, requiring policy principles to adapt as well. Monetary policy thus poses problems that cannot be solved once and for all, but must be coped with continuously.

[Eliminating history from economic thought] Formal analysis, in which maximizing agents use today's 'true' model of the economy to form expectation upon which they then base their behaviour, trivializes the role of the future in economic life and ignores the possibility that the past's models, which helped generate the data against which today's models are tested, differed from the latter. Such analysis denies that economics has a relevant history, and its current dominance explains the decline of the history of economic thought within the discipline. [Mark Blaug on the quantity theory: A skirmish on the border between science and politics in the history of economic thought] Mark Blaug brought his usual standards of historical awareness and respect for empirical content to bear when he wrote about the Quantity Theory of Money, but he hesitated to probe too deeply into the political and ideological elements of its history, perhaps leading him to underestimate their importance for the theory's evolution.

Specific ideas about the Fisher relation between real and nominal interest rates and more general ideas about the nature of the central bank's duty to support the financial system in times of crisis were important to the Monetarist re-assessment of the causes of the Great Depression and what this event implied about the inherent stability of the market economy. Aspects of the evolution of these ideas since the Depression and the role that they have played in recent debates about the Great Recession are discussed, and some tentative conclusions about the validity of Monetarist ideas are drawn.

Milton Friedman's contributions to and influence on macroeconomics are discussed, beginning with his work on the consumption function and the demand for money, not to mention monetary history, which helped to undermine the post World War 2 Keynesian consensus in the area. His inter-related analyses of the dynamics of monetary policy's transmission mechanism, the case for a money growth rule, and the expectations augmented Phillips curve are then taken up, followed by a discussion of his influence not only directly on the monetarist policy experiments of the early 1980s, but also less directly on the regimes that underlay the great moderation that broke down in the crisis of 2007-2008. Friedman's seminal influence on the development of today's mainstream, stochastic, but essentially Walrasian, macroeconomic theory, rooted in his explicit deployment of econometric theory in the analysis of forward-looking maximising behaviour in 1957, and in his later work on the Phillips curve, is also assessed in the light of his own preference, which he shared with Keynes, for a pragmatic Marshallian approach to economic theorising.

Irving Fisher's encounter with the Quantity theory of Money began in the 1890s, during the debate about bimetallism, and reached its high point in 1911 with the publication of The Purchasing Power of Money. His most important refinement of the theory, derived from his recognition of bank deposits as means of exchange, was to treat their out of equilibrium recursive interaction with inflation as integral to it. This treatment underlay both his 1920s work on the business cycle as a dance of the dollar and his advocacy of subjecting monetary policy to a legislated price stability rule, initially to be based on his compensated dollar scheme. Fisher's failure to recognize the onset of the Great Depression even as it was happening was directly related to his faith in the quantity theory's seeming implication that price level stability in and of itself guaranteed the continuation of prosperity, while his subsequent work on the debt deflation theory of great depressions initially failed to repair the damage that this failure did to his reputation, and to that of the quantity theory. In the 1930s Fisher nevertheless remained an active supporter of various schemes to reflate and then stabilize the price level. His subsequent influence on the quantity theory based Monetarist counter-revolution that began in the 1950s lay, directly, in its deployment of his analysis of expected inflation on nominal interest rates, and, indirectly, in its espousal of the case for subjecting monetary policy to a legislated rule.n.