| This thesis explores some aspects of American economic thinking in the years between the World Wars. I focus on three specific case studies, each of which constitutes a chapter of the dissertation: (1) the spread of Italian economic ideas in the United States between 1890 and 1940; (2) the contribution of the institutional economist John Maurice Clark to the genesis and development of the so called multiplier analysis; and (3) the debate over the psychological foundations of economics from 1914 to 1944 with main---although not exclusive---focus on the debate within American institutionalism. The methodology adopted in the case studies combines traditional historical narrative, archival research and mathematical modeling. The main goal of these studies is to provide material for a reconsideration of the of the highly imperfect---if not definitely wrong---standard narrative according to which US interwar was characterized by neoclassical and institutional economist as to conflicting, indeed warring, schools. As it emerges from the three case studies, the interwar situation seems likely to have been very differently structured, if, indeed, it was clearly structured at all. Many economists practiced a discipline in which no fundamental exclusionary distinction was made between an institutional and a neoclassical approach; each individual combined, in his or her own way, the study of institutions and the study of market and prices. In this connection, the first paper shows how such an inner pluralism of U.S. interwar economics favored an intense and fruitful exchange of ideas between American economists and their Italian counterparts. The claim that institutionalists were anti-theoretical is challenged in the second case study, where I discuss Clark's version of the multiplier. In the third case study, the analysis of the debate over instinct theory and behaviorism in economics shows how this debate---while perhaps centered within institutionalism---were not merely confined to institutionalists, but spilt over to authors in other traditions. I will also demonstrate that at this point institutionalist and "orthodox" discourses were not separated but closely interconnected. |
