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It is a common misunderstanding that nineteenth‐century German economics rejected Ricardo and his thought. However, Ricardo exercised a strong influence on German views on production and distribution. In particular he influenced Wilhelm Roscher. Argues that Roscher in turn exercised a considerable influence on the work of Karl Marx. Analyses the aspects of Roscher′s work which were particularly influenced by Ricardo, and those where Roscher went beyond Ricardo, his notion of a macroeconomic production function; increasing returns to scale; and the role of small firms.

Nobody concerned with political economy can neglect the history of economic doctrines. Structural changes in the economy and society influence economic thinking and, conversely, innovative thought structures and attitudes have almost always forced economic institutions and modes of behaviour to adjust. We learn from the history of economic doctrines how a particular theory emerged and whether, and in which environment, it could take root. We can see how a school evolves out of a common methodological perception and similar techniques of analysis, and how it has to establish itself. The interaction between unresolved problems on the one hand, and the search for better solutions or explanations on the other, leads to a change in paradigma and to the formation of new lines of reasoning. As long as the real world is subject to progress and change scientific search for explanation must out of necessity continue.

During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred years after his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this chapter, the authors discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf.

The rise of the regulatory state during the Gilded Age was closely associated with the development of institutionalist ideas in American academia. In their analysis of the emergent regulatory environment, institutionalists like John Commons operated with a fundamentally marginalist theory of value and distribution. This engagement is a central explanation for the ultimate ascendancy of neoclassical economics, and the limitations of the regulatory environment that emerged in the Progressive Era. The eventual rise of the Chicago School and its deregulatory ambitions did constitute a rupture, but one achieved without rejecting preceding conceptions of competition and value. The substantial compatibility of the view of markets underlying both the regulatory and deregulatory periods is stressed, casting doubt about the transformative potential of the resurgent regulatory impulse in the New Gilded Age.

By now, it is one of the standard tropes of those who write about the professionalization of American economics that there was a methodenstreit between the marginalists and the historicists at the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. As recently as last year, Nancy Cohen (2002) argued that the only problem with this picture is that we have not understood correctly that the marginalists had actually won much sooner than we realized, sometime before 1900. Dorothy Ross’s classic The Origins of Amercian Social Science (1991) plays off the same dichotomy, but offers the older chronology, that “[b]etween about 1890 and 1910 marginal economics became the dominant paradigm in American economics.”

Considers the question of how the works of Roscher were regarded in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Although Roscher′s works were neither received nor accepted in the GDR, nevertheless, people there did occupy themselves with his ideas. Deals with three questions: what was the result of this occupation with Roscher′s ideas? What was the basisof it? What were the characteristics relevant to history of the treatment Roscher received in the GDR?

This is an unusual book and a striking phenomenon. It comprises a collection of thirteen essays on the German Historical School of Economics (henceforth GHSE), exclusively written by Japanese contributors who are mainly full professors at leading universities and mostly have already published on various aspects of the GHSE. The editor, Yuichi Shionoya, is well known internationally as one of the most prominent students of Joseph Schumpeter and Max Weber, whose works provide the basis for the editor’s attempt to erect the framework of the rational reconstruction of the GHSE in the opening essay. This holds in particular for economic sociology, which – besides theory, history and statistics – constitutes the fourth discipline in economics, and includes the social institutions relevant to economic behaviour and also political, legal or religious aspects. The investigation of Schumpeter’s conception of economic sociology (see, e.g. Schumpeter, 1954, pp. 20–21) is at the very heart of Shionoya’s second essay (9) in which the author concludes that Schumpeter combined two essential elements of the GHSE, a belief in the unity of social life and the inseparable relationship among its components and a concern for development, with some stimulus by Max Weber’s analysis of comparative-static social systems and Marx’s analysis of the dynamic process of capital accumulation. It is Shionoya’s belief “that Schumpeter should be regarded as one of the successors of the German Historical School because he attempted a rational reconstruction of that school, especially Schmoller’s research program, in terms of economic sociology and made his own contribution from this perspective” (p. 9). Whether and how this statement from the editor’s first essay fully fits with the one from Shionoya’s second essay, that “Schumpeter’s conception of economic sociology intended to integrate history and theory, the antitheses at the Methodenstreit between Gustav von Schmoller and Carl Menger” (p. 139), is left to the reader’s judgement. Characteristically, the contradictions involved can be found in Schumpeter’s own writings. In the very same year, 1926, in which he published the article “Gustav von Schmoller and the Problems of Today,” which forms the key basis for Shionoya’s argument, Schumpeter eliminated the seventh chapter on “The Overall View of the Economy” of the first German edition of The Theory of Economic Development from the second German one and omitted it in all later editions of the book, including the 1934 English translation. The reason was that Schumpeter believed that this chapter with its much broader perspective and its fragment of cultural sociology has sometimes distracted the reader’s attention from pure and “dry” economic reasoning. It had led to a kind of consent which was at the very opposite of his intentions in so far as the seventh chapter was misunderstood as an alternative to economic theory. For that kind of reasoning Schumpeter did not want to provide any ammunition. For Shionoya, on the other hand, Chap. 7 is not a fragment of cultural sociology but a research program for a universal social science that he has specified in an earlier article (Shionoya, 1990) in which he regrets Schumpeter’s decision to omit it.

Schumpeter is popular these days among the economic policy makers and politicians in Washington, DC. In “high tech” America, Schumpeter’s felicitous phrase “creative destruction” is on many lips. The recent meltdown of numerous dot.com firms on the NASDAQ exchange has taught formerly optimistic baby boomers how hard the “creative destruction” process can hit their pocketbooks and wipe out their accumulations of “shareholders value.” Yet for many, “creative destruction” is still the guidepost to a better and more prosperous future.

This paper argues that the well-known “two Schumpeters” thesis, as understood in the Anglo-American literature on technological change, is clearly wrong. Equally wrong is the idea that the fundamentals of Schumpeter’s thought on entrepreneurship were influenced importantly by his observation of large firms in the United States after 1931. The obsolescence thesis speaks to a distinction between early capitalism and later capitalism, perhaps, but not to an earlier and later Schumpeter. A more important point is that the obsolescence thesis is wrong. It rests on a confusion – or perhaps a bait-and-switch – between two quite different kinds of economic knowledge.

This paper examines Hayek’s version of methodological individualism in relation to individual economic actions and economic effectiveness (social actions). According to this approach, economic and social order is determined by the myriad atomistic actions that are the result of individual planning taking into consideration the idiosyncratic nature of knowledge. Economic policy is a form of social planning which is not only ineffective but also has cataclysmic long‐lasting effects, creating a disorder in the market system. Two arguments are made in this study. First, methodological individualism should be considered and be accepted as a serous attempt to explain atomistic (economic) behaviour as purposeful actions constrained by scarce resources and limited knowledge. Second, Hayek’s strong version of methodological individualism is very simplistic as it is applied to economic policy issues, contradicting his argument in support of a methodological dualism.