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Today Lionel Penrose is recognised as the co-author of one of the two leading indices of power in voting legislatures – a field of study that game theory in general, and cooperative game theory in particular, has been reclaiming from sociology and political science since the 1950s. The main claim of this paper is that Penrose developed his index so as to tackle questions that go vastly beyond the narrow domain of voting; namely, acute social issues during the Cold War such as the outburst and propagation of panics, the ideological susceptibility of populations, the escalation of military conflict and the successful installation of authoritarian regimes. Furthermore, by revisiting the history of the Penrose power index, the paper re-evaluates some of its key underlying assumptions: assumptions that have been heavily – and unfairly, as the paper argues – criticised over the last decade.

Walter Lippmann is widely acknowledged as the Father of modern American Journalism and one of the most profound public thinkers of the twentieth century. Though he extensively corresponded with economists, political philosophers, political scientists, and statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic, Lippmann’s interest in political economy has only come under serious academic investigation within the last 20 years. When Lippmann has been explored in the history of economic thought, he has generally been considered to be a propagator and popularizer of others’ ideas rather than a serious theorist in his own right, particularly his role in spreading Keynesianism as one of the early supporters of the New Deal. This chapter directly challenges this dominant interpretation on two fronts. First, it acknowledges and explores Lippmann’s role as a contributor to the economic discourse of his time. Second, it challenges categorizing Lippmann as a Keynesian by highlighting the closeness of many of his ideas to the Austrian school of thought. It accomplishes this by giving a holistic view of Lippmann’s thought, not only in the Great Depression and New Deal Era, but how he evolved from a student sympathetic to socialism at Harvard in 1910 to a theorist concerned with epistemological problems of good political, social, and economic order. The development of Lippmann’s thought in this broader lens parallels much of the work of Hayek, Mises, and others during this period, and presents rich new research opportunities for both modern Austrian economists as well as historians of economic thought.

This chapter presents an exposition of the Generalized Fechner–Thurstone (GFT) direct utility function, the system of demand functions derived from it, other systems of demand functions from which it can be derived, and its purpose and the econometric circumstances that motivated its original development. Its use in econometrics is demonstrated by an application to household consumer survey data which explores the relationship between prices, on the one hand, and expected exogenous preference changers such as household size, schooling of heads of household, and other social factors, on the other.

This paper is an initial attempt to discuss the American institutionalist movement as it changed and developed after 1945. Institutionalism in the inter-war period was a relatively coherent movement held together by a set of general methodological, theoretical, and ideological commitments (Rutherford, 2011). Although institutionalism always had its critics, it came under increased attack in the 1940s, and faced challenges from Keynesian economics, a revived neoclassicism, econometrics, and from new methodological approaches derived from various versions of positivism. The institutionalist response to these criticisms, and particularly the criticism that institutionalism “lacked theory,” is to be found in a variety of attempts to redefine institutionalism in new theoretical or methodological terms. Perhaps the most important of these is to be found in Clarence Ayres’ The Theory of Economic Progress (1944), although there were many others. These developments were accompanied by a significant amount of debate, disagreement, and uncertainty over future directions. Some of this is reflected in the early history of The Association for Evolutionary Economics.

Published below are the course reading list and student notes taken by F. Taylor Ostrander in Frank H. Knight’s course, Current Tendencies, Economics 303, at the University of Chicago during Winter term of the 1933–1934 academic year. The reading list is surprisingly casual and uneven in detail among items. The notes are assumed, as usual in these volumes, to be a reasonably accurate summary account of what Knight said.

Dan Hammond’s written comments on a paper I presented at the ASSA/HES meetings in January on Chicago economics and institutionalism (Hammond, 2003; Rutherford, 2003a) questioned the usefulness of the concept of “institutional economics” as a category with which to discuss the history of American economics from about 1918 on. My paper and Hammond’s comments form the background to this roundtable discussion. Although my original piece is not reproduced here, I will begin with some direct comments on what I take to be Hammond’s main points of contention.