Abstract

Arguments and disagreements abound in the history of political economy and contemporary economics. This dissertation is about such arguments and disagreements. It focuses on the differences and disagreements in history of the "theory of value" from Adam Smith to Alfred Marshall and attempts to understand such differences. It tries to do so by providing a general framework for interpreting such differences. It is thus primarily a series of interrelated essays on historical-methodological interpretation. ;In the first five chapters, the ideas on value by Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Jevons, Walras, and Marshall, and their criticisms of their predecessors, are situated and interpreted within their larger theoretical and methodological contexts. It is shown in these five chapters and later argued in Chapter Six and Seven that these differences and disagreements could be better understood within this general framework of interpretation. The main idea can be put briefly as follows: to better understand differences and disagreements in the history of the theory of value, in particular those arguments-criticisms of their predecessors, one must recognize the different problems, aims and nature of inquiry of each thinker, within which his theoretical ideas and his criticisms of his predecessors were argued. This means that to make sense of these differences, one must try to understand the norms/methods/values of inquiry which each thinker either explicitly or implicitly presupposed in connection with his attempt to provide solutions to certain problems and carry out certain tasks of inquiry. No formula--much less a mechanical one--is offered in answer to the problematic of this inquiry. But the dissertation tries to show and argue that within this general framework of interpretation we can better understand and make rational sense of these differences and disagreements. ;In these interpretations and arguments, I employed a variety of ideas from philosophy and methodology, including those developed in the history and philosophy of science. For instance, the ideas of Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend, as well as those of Searle and Wittgenstein were either explicitly employed or implicitly presupposed . Logical and philosophical analyses, broadly understood, were also employed in the service of historical methodological interpretation. ;Later and for the most part of Chapter Seven, I proceeded toward a more normative methodological discourse which was also broader in scope than in previous chapters. I then proposed, in fragments and sketches, various provisional ideas towards understanding, in a more normative vein, these differences and disagreements in the history of the theory of value