The End of a Mirage

Author(s):  
Brigitte Granville

This chapter describes the learning trajectory that led economists and policymakers to regard controlling inflation as a priority and to pursue this goal of greater price stability more effectively. It focuses on one particular episode in the history of macroeconomic controversy—namely, how a set of economic ideas shifted the general conduct of monetary policy that had prevailed since John Hicks's interpretation (1937) of John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936). This “new” thinking about inflation and monetary policy reacted against the contemporary orthodoxy because the prevailing theory had proved to be unsatisfactory in analyzing the changing nature of the economy.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantinos Repapis

In this paper we investigate Werner Stark’s sociology of knowledge approach in the history of economic thought. This paper explores: 1) The strengths and weaknesses of Stark’s approach to historiography, 2) seeing how this can frame an understanding of mercantilist writings and, 3) develop a link between a pluralist understanding of economics, and the sociology of knowledge approach. The reason for developing this link is to extend the sociology of knowledge approach to encompass a pluralist understanding of economic theorising and, at the same time, clarify the link between context and economic theory. John Maynard Keynes’ practice of building narratives of intellectual traditions as evidenced in The General Theory is used to develop a position between an understanding of history of economic thought as the evolution of abstract and de-contextualized economic theorising and, the view of economic theory as only relevant within the social conditions from which it arose.


Author(s):  
Eric Helleiner

Abstract As the global crisis triggered by the COVID-19 virus unfolded, The Economist magazine published a cover in May 2020 titled “Goodbye globalization: the dangerous lure of self-sufficiency.” The title summed up well the new political interest in the ideology of national economic self-sufficiency in the pandemic context. Unfortunately, contemporary textbooks in the field of international political economy (IPE) say little about this kind of “autarkic” thought. No survey of the history of autarkic thought exists even within specialist IPE literature or in the fields of intellectual history and the history of economic thought. Filling this gap in existing scholarship, this article highlights a rich history of autarkic thought that includes the ideas of famous thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Fichte, Mohandas Gandhi, and John Maynard Keynes. Three core rationales for a high degree of national self-sufficiency have been advanced in the past: (1) insulation from foreign economic influence, (2) insulation from foreign political and/or cultural influence, and (3) the promotion of international peace. At the same time, considerable disagreements have existed among autarkists about some of these rationales and their relative importance, as well as about the precise meaning of national self-sufficiency. These disagreements stemmed not just from differences in their specific goals but also from the different conditions across time and space in which autarkic thought was developed. In addition to improving understanding of the autarkic ideological tradition, this article contributes to emerging scholarship attempting to overcome Western-centrism in IPE scholarship as well as literature exploring the new politics of de-globalization in the current era.


2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-116
Author(s):  
James H. Ullmer

Nicholas Barbon (1640–1698) is little appreciated by most historians of economic thought. He is sporadically mentioned in a few writings—probably the most well-known being the favorable reference to him made by John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes 1936, p. 359). The fullest treatment of Barbon's economic ideas is contained in The Origin of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought 1660–1776 by William Louis Letwin (Letwin 1963, pp. 48–75). Letwin considers a major defect of Barbon's first purely scientific inquiry into economics, A Discourse of Trade (Barbon 1690), and by implication, his other economic writings, to be “the logical incoherence of its parts” (Letwin 1963, p. 57). This criticism is not surprising in light of the pre-paradigm period in which Barbon was writing.


2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Rury

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”


Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Mihnea Bâlici

Fracturism proved to be the “spearhead” of the 2000 generation. The first and by far the most radical literary group formed after 1989, this promotion became the cultural expression of a difficult context in the post-revolutionary history of Romania. The aim of this study is to analyze the origin, the function and the effects of the Fracturist ideas proposed by Marius Ianuș and Dumitru Crudu in 1998. Most literary interpretations failed to capture the specificity of this promotion. This is due to the fact that the aesthetic program was never a priority for the Fracturists. It can be emphasized that Fracturism appeared in a specific set of historical, political, social, institutional and cultural circumstances. The present analysis aims to clarify the complex links between the difficult post-communist transition, the crisis of the Romanian literary field and the ostentatious literary expression of the new authors. In this regard, a certain performative dimension of fracturism can be theorized: the poets and prose writers of the new millennium will militate against a distressing social reality by changing the very role of the contemporary author.


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 1010-1021
Author(s):  
Xu Jianzhong

Abstract Science translation is a new branch of learning in China, but its practice can be traced back to about 200 BC. It includes all the practical fields but literary translation. It is the translation activity that mainly conveys science information, especially a thought activity and extra-language activity of the translator’s using target language to express the science information of source language so as to pursue the similar information. This paper briefly examines its history chronologically, and explores its gradual movement from practice to theory, from written translation to oral interpretation, from general theory to discipline studies. The history of science translation is composed of human translation and machine translation, but this paper only deals with the former.


Author(s):  
Philip Arestis ◽  
Malcolm Sawyer

Macroeconomic policies come from the “vision” of the ways in which an economy works. A “vision” of the economy where unemployment is a frequent occurrence gives rise to quite different policies from a “vision” of the economy in which there is little room for unemployment of labor, as, for example, in the New Classical macroeconomics. The macroeconomic vision that underlies the policy agenda of this chapter is described as Kaleckian-Keynesian, as it draws on the works and ideas of Michal Kalecki and John Maynard Keynes and others that approach the matter in a similar fashion. This chapter explores a modern Kaleckian-Keynesian framework for economic theory and policy. It first discusses fiscal policy, the main instrument of macroeconomic policy, before turning to monetary policy as well as financial policy, inflation, and policies that relate to product markets and labor markets.


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