“Iwas born in 1902 in Görlitz, a small provincial town in Germany, and raised in Vienna, the great city of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. On my father's side, my family goes back to about 1530 in Saxony, my Lutheran forebears having been farmers, church wardens, judges, and businessmen. My mother was a natural daughter of Frederick III of Germany …”

Yet another account of myself, for yet another encyclopaedia. Italian, this time. Once again, I put pen to paper and collapse the events of fifty years ago to a few familiar milestones. Now what shall I tell these Italians?

“I finished the Gymnasium and took my Dr. Rer. Pol. at the University of Vienna in 1925. Awarded a Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, I spent the next three years in England, the United States, France and Italy. Returning to Vienna, I soon became Docent, later Professor, at the University, and Director of the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research …”

And then there will be the doctoral thesis, Wirtschaftsprognose, the other Institute, Princeton, and so on. It is remarkable really, the rehearsed inevitability of it all … So often have I gone through exercises of this kind that there are times when I even begin to believe them myself.

Of the published works by William Stanley Jevons, the marginalist theory of value and distribution in the Theory of Political Economy (1871) is principally remembered by economists today. For Jevons in the early 1870s, however, the reception of the Theory (TPE) had “been of the most discouraging character.” The “recognised professor[s] of the science,” for example, had either ignored or, in the case of J. E. Cairnes, “emphatically repudiated it” (Jevons 1875a, p. 4). In November 1874, buoyed by the publication of the first volume of Leon Walras's Elements of Pure Economics and by correspondence with Walras and other European economists, Jevons presented a defense of the marginalist theory and reply to critics in an address titled “The Progress of the Mathematical Theory of Political Economy.” It was delivered to the Manchester Statistical Society, and was extensively reported in the local newspapers. Jevons used those reports to both publicize and obtain comments on the address before the final version was published in 1875. As some of the papers circulated beyond Manchester, London, readers, for example, could also read or hear of his analysis. In that regard, one component of his argument attracted particular attention.

This paper brings together and expands methodological ideas on Joseph Alois Schumpeter that I have discussed in detail and at length elsewhere (Shionoya 1997). Schumpeter is known for his wide-ranging work, and I interpret it as an attempt a universal social science consisting of three systems of thought: i.e., substantive theory, metatheory, and pretheory. These three systems stand for the scope and method of his universal social science.

In promoting spontaneous orders—orders that evolve in a process of cultural evolution—as “efficient,” “beneficial,” and “advantageous,” Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992) has often been attributed the belief that there is something desirable about them. For this reason, he has been accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy, that is, of trying to derive an “ought” from an “is.” It appears that Hayek was quite aware of the charge, and vigorously disputed it: “I have no intention to commit what is often called the genetic or naturalistic fallacy” (1988, p. 27).

One of the basic ideas underlying the established conception of rational behavior is the unlimited substitutability of preferences. Economic agents are assumed to compare and reduce everything to a common denominator: utility. The most obvious example of such preferences can be found in standard consumer theory where complete substitutability of every good is assumed in the sense that a loss of some units of one bundle can always be compensated by gain of some units of another commodity (such preferences are sometimes called Archimedian—see Borch 1968). This conception of preferences has a long history in economic thought and forms the basis of the standard rational choice theory (Hicks and Allen 1934, Samuelson 1938, Hicks 1946, Houthakker 1950).

Torrens [in 1815] clearly preceded Ricardo [in 1817] in publishing a fairly satisfactory formulation of the doctrine [of comparative costs]. It is unquestionable, however that Ricardo is entitled to the credit for first giving due emphasis to the doctrine, for first placing it an appropriate setting, and for obtaining general acceptance for it by economists.

Sir William Petty (1623–1687) is generally known to historians of economic thought as an early contributor to classical political economy. In fact, Karl Marx claimed—rightly, I believe—that Petty was the founder of that school of thought (Marx 1867, p. 81). Frank Amati and Tony Aspromourgos echo the sentiment that Petty, and not Adam Smith, was “the founder of classical political economy, that school which had its culmination in the Ricardian economic theory” (Amati and Aspromourgos 1985, p. 127). Aspromourgos has also observed that Petty wrote A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, as well as other works, in order to provide “an answer to the questions of how to maximize total employment and surplus labour, and how to best utilize surplus labour” (Aspromourgos 1996, p. 16, emphasis added).