Recent commentators have dealt mainly with Leslie's methodological work, but Leslie had produced papers on applied political economy for 25 years before he published one devoted specifically to the historical method. The present article concentrates on Leslie's use of that method and the results...

This paper, presented as an addresss to the Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought, argues that writing history may be more interesting if progress is not made the leitmotif. Starting from an examination of early causal accounts of the history of political...