Each year, new economics Ph.D. students learn the proof of the existence of a competitive equilibrium as if it were a rite of passage. From the utility-maximizing behavior of consumers and the profit-maximizing behavior of firms, neophyte economists soon can demonstrate that under certain conditions there exists a competitive market-clearing general equilibrium price vector. While there are a number of proofs that establish the existence of such an equilibrium, the validity of these proofs is indubitable. Indeed, economists with even scant knowledge of the history of economics can identify Kenneth J. Arrow and Gerard Debreu's Econometrica paper as having provided the proof that settled the issue.

Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky (1865–1919) has not unjustly been calle the greatest Russian economist of all time (Jasny 1972, p. 159). This neglecte the fact that he was born near Kharkov and towards the end of his life came to see the Ukraine as his homeland, but the evaluation itself is not so far from the truth. However, opinion about the precise importance of Tugan-Baranovsky work to the development of trade cycle analysis has varied widely. J. M. Keynes and A. H. Hansen were both highly respectful of Tugan's contribution. For example, in the Treatise on Money, Keynes wrote in regards to business cycle theory that he was “in strong sympathy with the school of writers … of which Tugan-Baranovski was the first and most original” (Keynes 1930, vol. 2, p. 100 In his 1951 work, Business Cycles and National Income, Hansen was enthusiastic describing Tugan as “cutting his way though the jungle to a new outlook” (Hansen 1951, p. 281). This suggests that some aspects of both British an American Keynesianism might have originated in Tugan's work, or at least bee influenced by it. W. W. Rostow was also impressed by Tugan's approach, statin that it “took business cycle analysis some distance beyond Juglar and Marx” (Rostow 1990, p. 261).

Students of economic thought have long associated with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the spread of attitudes in Europe more tolerant of market processes. New economic attitudes appear in a variety of literary forms during the fifteenth century (McGovern 1970). As compared to the pronouncements of a number of Patristic figures, relatively greater tolerance of commerce is expressed by medieval theologians. In fact, recent scholarly efforts suggest that by the late thirteenth century, suspicions of economic activity remained, but Scholastic thinkers increasingly recognized the importance of an impersonal market process in everyday life and sought to find ways to understand it in light of their concern with natural order (Kaye 1998a). While condemning avarice, Scholastic writers such as San Antonino of Florence and San Bernadino of Sienna explicitly endorsed trade as legitimate when practiced for the common good and when associated with modest profit (Origo 1962; De Roover 1967). Recognition of this movement in thought, especially as it applied the concerns of economic justice to trade in commodities, is explicit in the literature of preclassical economics. But until recently, less attention has been paid to more specific developments in scholastic thinking on justice in the labor market.

This article intends to assess and compare the main contributions to our discipline of two major authors and authorities. Both of them originated in Central Europe and, later on, went to work in the United States, where their most important books on the subject were published posthumously during the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, besides pertaining to different generations, they also were very unlike from each other.

The eldest, Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950), remains much better known among contemporary economists, although very few of them seem to have read in its entirety his imposing History of Economic Analysis (1954a), still a model of our trade. The same probably also applies to his shorter and previous book on the same subject, Economic Doctrine and Method, which had been initially published in Germany forty years earlier, as well as to the essays collected in his Ten Great Economists: From Marx to Keynes.