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Many early 19th century economic thinkers have provided ideas to explain the causes of commercial crises, as against the Classical belief on the impossibility of a general disequilibrium between demand and supply. J.S. Mill contributed to this debate suggesting an analysis of money and credit as generators of economic fluctuations and crises. Mill apprehended the significance of the function of money as a store of value and explained cyclical fluctuations based on three interrelated causes: the role of money as credit, the propensity of moneylenders to overexpand their credit and the effect of the general tendency of profits to fall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the importance of scientific progress to historians of economics. Restrictions of the philosophy of natural sciences for the case of economic theory; Significance of alternative modes of historical reconstruction; Necessity for a methodologically oriented history.

Weber recognized explicitly that his concept of ideal-type is directly borrowed from economic theory and as it is commonly admitted from the German-speaking 'marginalist school'. Nevertheless, the construction of ideal-types reminds greatly the definition of economic rationality made by John Stuart Mill, who also built up a concept to explain, in individualistic terms, the real world in a given historical and geographical context. The position defended here is that Weber generalizes Mill's methodological proposition of concept formation regarding economic rationality to accomplish his much larger project of determining the social factors responsible for the rationalization of the Western civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bagehot wrote on the methodology of Ricardian political economy some years after the appearance of marginalism. The purpose of this paper is to examine and evaluate his methodological positions. Bagehot made some significant contributions concerning the nature of economic explanation, the relevance of economic assumptions and the limits of the validity of economic theories. His positions were strongly influenced by social anthropology and Darwinian evolutionism. Bagehot's originality lies in his evolutionist view of the Ricardian political economy, a view that led him to limit its validity and to reinforce its realisticness, at a time when economics was about to take an opposite direction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]