Volume 47 - Issue 3 - September 2025
Contents
Article
THE SOCIALISTS’ HYPOTHESES AND THE ROAD TO SERFDOM
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 24 February 2025, pp. 291-316
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This paper examines the writings of socialist scholars who played a pivotal role in shaping Friedrich Hayek’s perspective in The Road to Serfdom, including William Beveridge, Stuart Chase, Henry Dickinson, Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin, Oskar Lange, Harold Laski, Abba Lerner, Barbara Wootton, and the contributing authors in Findlay MacKenzie’s Planned Society (1937). Many of these socialist thinkers held two main hypotheses. First, industrial concentration was inevitable under capitalism. Second, they argued, government ownership or control of key economic sectors was necessary to protect democracy from industrial consolidation in the capitalist system and to reduce political opposition to complete state ownership or control over the means of production. Despite sharing Hayek’s concern for socialism’s potential erosion of democratic freedoms, these socialist hypotheses have received much less scholarly attention than Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. We conclude that Hayek formalized socialist scholars’ fears and developed a well-defined hypothesis that central planning could threaten democratic freedoms.
HAYEK ON ARISTOTLE: THE DEBRIS OF A GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY, VIA POPPER, POLANYI, AND RÖPKE
- Morris Karp
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 March 2025, pp. 317-338
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During his life, Friedrich Hayek drastically changed his evaluation of Aristotle’s role in the history of political and economic thought. Initially considering Aristotle as one of the forerunners of the liberal tradition, he then came to consider Aristotle’s philosophy as the source of collectivist thought. By examining both published and unpublished materials, this article shows that Hayek’s attack on Aristotle in The Fatal Conceit is authentic and puts Hayek’s affirmations on Aristotle in the context of his intellectual development. Hayek’s rejection of Aristotle can be related to his increasing emphasis on the abstract nature of the rules governing complex phenomena. However, this does not explain why Hayek felt compelled to take such a stance on an ancient philosopher who was highly esteemed in the school he belonged to. Hayek’s abandonment of the established view on the Aristotelian roots of the Austrian school can be better understood by considering the intellectual environment of his time. His eventual adoption of Karl Popper’s point of view on Aristotle meant taking a stance against Karl Polanyi’s democratic socialism and distancing himself from Wilhelm Röpke’s Catholic conservatism.
MORE ON THE ORIGIN OF FINANCIAL ECONOMICS: EARLY CONTRIBUTIONS TO JOINT LIFE ANNUITY VALUATION
- Geoffrey Poitras
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 11 February 2025, pp. 339-362
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The origin of modern financial economics can be traced to early discounted expected value solutions for the price of life annuities. In contrast to the single life annuity valuations attributed to Jan de Witt and Edmond Halley, the computational complexity of joint life annuity valuation posed difficulties. Following a brief review of various joint life annuity specifications, a history of joint life annuity issuance and valuation in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries is provided. With this background, the 1671 correspondence from de Witt to Jan Hudde on possible methods for valuing joint life annuities is detailed. These methods are contrasted with the geometric method described in Halley (1693), providing impetus for examination of the analytical approximations developed by Abraham de Moivre and Thomas Simpson.
RISK, UNCERTAINTY, AND ENTREPRENEURIAL PROFIT: FRED M. TAYLOR AND FRANK H. KNIGHT
- Luca Fiorito, Charles R. McCann, Jr.
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 26 September 2024, pp. 363-376
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Frank H. Knight is rightly regarded as having identified the distinction between risk and uncertainty and their respective roles in the entrepreneurial process in his 1921 Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. Less well appreciated is his recognition of the work of Fred Manville Taylor in this work, even though throughout Knight made several laudatory references to Taylor’s Principles. This article will examine through the various editions of Taylor’s textbook parallels between Taylor and Knight in their respective understandings of the risk-uncertainty distinction and the emphasis each placed on the role of the entrepreneur.
ADAM SMITH ON THE “WRETCHED SPIRIT OF MONOPOLY” IN THE EAST INDIES TRADE
- Mark Donoghue
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 October 2024, pp. 377-393
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According to Adam Smith, the “wretched spirit of monopoly” dogged the East Indies trade. The regulations that governed the East Indies trade established legal barriers or restrictions to entry and sustained a mercantile community whose interests were “the opposite to that of the great body of the people” (WN IV, ch. iii, p. 494). The East Indies charter conferred a special privilege that shielded the English East India Company from all domestic competition in Asian trade. The East India Company was the complete incarnation of a mercantile system against which Smith had determined to launch “a very violent attack” in Wealth of Nations (Smith 1987, p. 251). Smith’s mistrust of trading bodies like the East India Company was compounded by its having assumed political powers commensurate with the sovereign while still in possession of its monopolistic franchise. Smith’s proposal was, first, to abolish the monopolistic franchise to rid society of “the unfortunate effects of all the regulations of the mercantile system” (WN IV, ch. vii, p. 606), and, second, to reform the East India Company’s administrative duties and functions in the Indian territories. The contention of this paper is that Smith’s call to abolish the East Indies monopoly was inseparable from his appeal for reform of the English East India Company.
TEACHING GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY: AN ANALYSIS OF TREATISES
- Lúcia Regina Centurião
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 April 2025, pp. 394-416
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This paper investigates the teaching of Walrasian general equilibrium theory in the early twentieth century through an analysis of three treatises: Arthur Bowley’s The Mathematical Groundwork of Economics (1924), Gustav Cassel’s The Theory of Social Economy (1924), and Étienne Antonelli’s Principes d’économie pure (1914). Despite their original contributions, the three works were also intended to be read by students. Examining these treatises contributes to a historical understanding of pre-war economics education literature and sheds light on the evolution of mathematical economics, particularly within the context of the educational process. The paper concludes that while all three treatises presented Léon Walras’s general equilibrium framework, they simultaneously reflected diverse fundamental beliefs about economic science, such as its objective and scope. Notably, there was no singular dominant group appropriating Walras’s model. However, a content analysis revealed structural similarities among the treatises.
Book Review
Front Cover (OFC, IFC) and matter
HET volume 47 issue 3 Cover and Front matter
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 29 August 2025, pp. f1-f4
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Back Cover (OBC, IBC) and matter
HET volume 47 issue 3 Cover and Back matter
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Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 29 August 2025, p. b1
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