Wartime in the history of economic thought: episodes in European history

AbstractThe paper is concerned with war in the history of economic thought. It looks at disputes about abstraction versus historicism over the long 19th century, in relation to war and the state. It then looks at the historical setting in which Léon Walras and others developed their ideas of political economy. It concludes with reflections on the presence or absence of the state in modern economic history.Keywords: WarEuropeabstractionWalrasstateJEL CODES: B10B30N00 Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 "UN climate report: It’s ‘now or never’ to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees," 4 April 2022, https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/04/1115452.2 “On the Invisible Trail of Binary Black Holes,” Science News, 100, 26 (25 December 1971), 419-420, 419.3 I am grateful to participants in the Leverhulme/Thyssen programme on the Rise and Fall of Historical Political Economy at the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge, for conversations about the institutional decline of historical economics. On the scale of post-1919 needs for welfare in Austria, see Hsia (Citation2022).4 On Perlmutter, see Dadej and Leszczawski-Schwerk, “Together and Apart," 39; Stauter-Halsted, The Devil's Chain, 75-76. On Grünfeld, see Grünfeld (Citation1932, Citation1942a, Citation1942b), and "Oral history interview with Judith Grunfel," United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Accession Number: 1999.A.0122.1675, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn874845 Alberto Alesina seminar on political economy at Harvard University, https://www.iq.harvard.edu/program-political-economy, accessed on 23 October 2022.6 See Chen and Yang (Citation2019) and Beraja, Yang and Yuchtman (Citation2022).