The popular view among many contemporary economists is that our predecessors were literate but not numerate. Their myopia is curious to those who have the benefit of greater historical perspective. Many early practitioners of political economy can be credited with recognizing that, by their very nature, the problems in which they were interested required them to measure, quantify and enumerate. From the seventeenth century onwards, inquiring minds had already learned to distrust information and ideas that derived from the then traditional qualitative approach to science, which described the sensations associated with objects and events. William Petty's Political Arithmetic is a case in point; it aimed not simply to record and describe reality in terms of

Positive Theory of Capital (1889) is a classic which contains Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's 1889 correct vision of how the interest rate might be determined by the interplay of systematic time preference (“impatience”) and time-phased technology's productivity. But he was not quite able to formulate his intuitive vision in terms that would satisfy today's persnickety jury of theorists. And indeed the classic Rate of Interest (1907) by his younger contemporary, Irving Fisher, seemed to be disagreeing with Böhm-Bawerk's treatment of time's net productivity; but, as Fisher was unable to make clear until 1930, he was objecting only to Böhm-Bawerk's formulation of the role of productivity in interest determination. In point of fact, Fisher, who was so long identified (wrongly, but understandably) as an “impatience theorist,” considered his own main contribution to interest theory to be his clarification of how the technological superiority of time-consuming processes cooperated in the determination of the equilibrium interest rate.

Kenneth J. Arrow's recent article on Ricardian theory (Arrow 1991) represents the occasion for a renewed discussion of the basic building blocks of the classics' analytical scheme and of the role of demand conditions in this context. Arrow's argument pivots around two ideas: that Ricardo's theory is built without any reference to demand, and that the role of demand can be conceived of only within the logical context of neoclassical demand functions, which are absent in Ricardo, thus making his theoretical scheme irremediably weak. These ideas form the basis of a drastically dichotomized representation on the part of Arrow of current interpretations of Ricardo. On the one hand are the neoclassical-type views, epitomized by his own position, with their emphasis on the allocation problem; on the other hand are the purely cost-oriented neo-Ricardian interpretations, with their strongly Marxist ideological bias.

Debate over the interpretation of David Ricardo's economics has assumed special relevance since the publication of Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960). Sraffa sought to revive and reconstruct a nearly lost classical tradition whose main elements, he believed, had been given their first coherent expression by Ricardo (Sraffa 1951, Garegnani 1984). On this interpretation, Ricardo's analysis, far from being a fumbling step toward the modern theory of supply and demand, as Marshall (1920) would have it, or a misguided detour as Jevons believed (1879), instead constitutes a logically consistent alternative to the marginalist theory that emerged after 1870.

Recent scholarship has noted differences and even discrepancies among the members of the so-called Austrian school. It has been possible to identify discontinuities between generations (Hayek 1968), along methodological lines (Caldwell 1988, Hutchison 1981), among the various threads of the “Austrian revival” (Vaughn 1990), and between heterogeneous intellectual systems (Dufourt and Garrouste 1993). Brian Loasby (1989) has remarked that Friedrich Hayek was one of the few scholars to develop one of Carl Menger's outstanding contributions to economics, his theory of social institutions (Langlois 1989). The purpose of this paper is to appraise the continuities and discontinuities between the two authors' conceptions of institutions. In what follows, I shall present successively Menger's and Hayek's conceptions of institutions, and then I shall compare them.

It is clear from the enormous literature on the subject that Karl Marx believed that his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is applicable only to the capitalist mode of production. Is there, however, really anything in the law which confines it specifically to capitalist production? This is an important question which is not asked in an explicit manner in the literature on Marx's economics. His most important law or tendency about the internal contradictions of capitalist production might turn out to be a characteristic of production per se—including socialist production in its ideal form.

Between 1928 and 1968, a common information environment in the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States with respect to the role of industrial capital in the economy produced theories of economic growth in all three countries. Emerging from different stages of development and different institutional circumstances in each country, the content of the theory of growth was different in each country. The different stages of development were defined by industrial structure and levels of capital accumulation, not by technological sophistication. In the 1920s and 1930s, all three countries experienced the obsolescence of the steam locomotive and the telegraph, and the emergence of new economic activities related to the internal combustion engine, electricity, radio and the telephone. With respect to technology, as such, there was a fairly common information environment. Differences lay in institutions, rates of investment, and levels of accumulation.