Over the past two decades, numerous contributions to the history of economics have tried to assess Paul Samuelson’s political positioning by tracing it in the subsequent editions of his famous textbook Economics. This literature, however, has provided no consensus about the location of...

The rise of visual representation in economics textbooks after WWII is one of the main features of contemporary economics. In this paper, we argue that this development has been preceded by a no less significant rise of visual representation in the larger literature devoted to social and...

The Laffer curve is a graphical representation of how government revenues vary with the level of taxation. Allegedly, it was first drawn on a cocktail napkin by one of US President Ronald Reagan's advisors in the 1970s. Since then, it has been routinely reproduced in economics textbooks. This...

Some historians argue that the history of economic thought (HET) is useful and important to economists and that historians should remain in economics departments. Others believe that historians' initiatives toward economists are doomed in advance to failure and that they should instead ally...

Textbooks are both neglected and at times overused as objects in the history of economics. They are neglected because most historians, borrowing from Kuhn, tend to regard them as passive receptacles of past knowledge, yet they are also overused as shortcuts to study the state of economic...