Annals of the Society for the History of Economic Thought

Banto Yamagata (1748-1821), a privileged Osaka merchant, spent his life during the period in which the Tokugawa regime entered a total structural crisis. As a rare rationalist who acquired universal reasoning from Confucian ideas, he proposed a system of economic thought (“keisei ron”) intended to promote a modern revival of the Confucian ideal politics “Jinsei” to overcome the crisis.
He advanced a plan for an ideal Physiocratic peaceful state based on the principle of self-sufficiency (“jisan-jisoku”), challenging the currently dominant ideology of the mercantilist wealth-state, while excessively idealizing the existing order. He rationally grasped Japan's backwardness as compared to the mercantilist Western countries, and was seriously concerned that the mercantilist view of the national interest, which promoted outward expansion, would accelerate the external and internal crises.
Thus we can see in his thinking, which emerged in the process of Japan's modernization, the possibility of rational Confucian economic thought.

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The first English collected edition of Bentham's works was edited and published under the ‘superintendence’ of John Bowirng. This is a commonpalce today, but little is known about the processes. Bowring was bequeathed by Bentham the greater part of manuscripts to be published after his death. However, Bowring not only excluded his religious writings from the collected edition, but also left many manuscripts unpublished. The Works was originally planned in seven volumes. But it was eventually published in eleven volumes in Part, and yet the publication of volumes was not in order. Bowring himself was absorbed in his own business during the period of compiling The Works. The editorial tasks were substantially carried out by his friends, R. Smith, T. S. Smith, R. Doane and J. H. Burton. As can be seen from the list of editors attached to the present paper, the greatest and final responsibility for editing The Works was in Burton's hands. Therefore, the first English collected edition of Bentham's works should be called Burton's edition rather than Bowring's.

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It has been just 150 years since Wilhelm Roscher outlined the historical method of economics in his Grundriß. With the publication of this manifestoprogramme and his lifework in five volumes, System der Volkswirtschaft (1854-1894), where he put the historical method in practise, Roscher is considered to be the founder of (Older) Historical School of German Economics. His ultimate goal of the historical method was to discover the development laws of nations as a part of natural laws in analogy to human physical development by comparing all civilized nations in the world history. On the problem of what Roscher would achieve by the historical method, however, it is important to make clear that he did not intend at all to construct the new other theories than classical economics, but only to supplement classical-abstract doctrines by a great many of historial-concrete investigations and development laws, and to educate legislators' or administrators' sense in understanding the complexity of economic phenomena that could avoid them falling “Ricardian Vice” (J. Schumpeter). We must pay attention to the fact that Roscher could completely take over the theories of classical economics built on “self-interest”, because he firmly believed as Lutheran a harmony between “self-interest” and “public-interest”. In this sense, “the spiritual initiator” would be more appropriate term than the “founder of Historical School of German Economics”.

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The writer examines ideas on the interpersonal comparison of utility (ICU) conceived by economists ranging over the period from the mid-19th c. through 1940. These ideas may be classified into three types: (1) one which shows more or less negative attitude to the possibility of ICU as a basis for economic policy, (2) one which appreciates ICU as the foundation of economic policy, (3) one which, sharing the appreciation with type (2), restricts the mode and scope of its application. And the choice of a particular type out of these alternatives involves what problems to set up as a subject matter and what kind of epistemological criteria to adopt. It may be characterised as a sort of paradigm choice.

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