Annual survey of ideas in History of economic thought journals (2014-2015)

This survey briefly comments on a selection of the papers published during 2014-2015 in the main international journals in the history of economic thought (HET henceforth) – the journals, that is to say, which are (or should be) matter of frequent consultation for historians of economic thought. Without any claim to be exhaustive, our work aims at being a useful, practical tool for the scholars, who will find in the survey a glimpse at some of the most debated topics of the last two years. This in the tradition of similar surveys of broad economic fields that were quite common in the past – a tradition that, for a rather circumscribed area such as the HET, it would be important to revive in an era of bibliometric obsession. The survey is divided in four sections, which we identify as the key subjects covered by recent HET. The first section reviews of a selection of the papers published on Classical Economics. The second section is dedicated to the literature on Austrian Economists. The third introduces some of the works on John Maynard Keynes and the Keynesians. The fourth is dedicated to the literature on Ronald Coase and Neo-institutional economics. While conceding that other threads in HET featured prominently in the 2014-2015 journal, these four areas are the ones that, to our view, best represent what was going on in our discipline’s journals.