A Research Annual: Volume 20 Part 1

This paper analyzes the first attempt to introduce in Portugal economic studies based on a neoclassical approach. In 1910 António Horta Osório wrote a textbook, A Mathematica na economia pura [Mathematics in pure economics], in the context of an attempt to obtain the chair of Political Economy at the Lisbon Polytechnic School. He did not receive the appointment, and although the book was translated into French, under the title Théorie mathématique de l'échange, and praised as a good elementary presentation of the basic framework of the general equilibrium theory of Léon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto, it had almost no effect on the Portuguese intellectual scene. Neoclassical economics would only become a standard paradigm in Portuguese universities in the 1940s. This paper explains why his name faded from the intellectual scene in Portugal and elsewhere.

Adam Smith never travelled to Russia but his published works certainly did. This short research note chronicles some pertinent facts on this topic, tracing the publication of editions of Smith's The Wealth of Nations in Russia in the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century; in particular it highlights a remarkable edition of this work published in the USSR in 1935. It also sketches some interpretations of Smith's ideas as given in Russian encyclopaedias and journals, and briefly chronicles the influence of some of Smith's ideas on policy-makers and economists in Russia in the nineteenth century. This account does not claim to be definitive, only to provide an introductory description of the propagation of some aspects of Smith's teachings in Russia from the end of the eighteenth century to World War Two. Smith himself was at least a little interested in Russia, as the three volumes on various aspects of Russia in his personal library indicate (Bonar, pp. 51, 111, 161), although unlike John Milton he never wrote a history of Moscovy.

This paper recounts my personal recollection of the small dinner meeting for Keynes during his first wartime visit to Washington, D.C. I recall the occasion well as it was a memorable one, and I have often told this story to students and friends. Despite the passage of time, I write about it now to get my story on the record as a part of my memoirs.

The paper also includes my comments on Roy Harrod's references to that dinner in his 1951 biography of Keynes, and a review of Keynes' correspondence following the dinner with some of the economists who were there.

John Bellamy Foster argues on philosophical grounds that Marx's materialism was largely an environmental and anti-religious statement, rather than a class based economic analysis. This essay takes issue with his characterization of Marx, and points to the limitations of such a one sided view of human affairs.