Table Of ContentMetaphors in the History of
Economic Thought
Metaphors in the History of Economic Thought: Crises, Business Cycles and Equi-
librium explores the evolution of economic theorizing through the lens of
metaphors. The edited volume sheds light on metaphors which have been
used by a range of key thinkers and schools of thought to describe economic
crises, business cycles and economic equilibrium.
Structured in three parts, the book examines an array of metaphors rang-
ing from mechanics, waves, storms, medicine and beyond. The international
panel of contributors focuses primarily on economic literature up to the Sec-
ond World War, knowing again that the use of metaphors in economic work
has seen a resurgence since the 1980s.
This work will be of interest to advanced students and researchers in the
h istory of economic thought, and economics and language.
Roberto Baranzini is a professor in economics and in the history and phi-
losophy of economics at the Centre Walras-Pareto, University of Lausanne,
Switzerland. His research covers the second half of the 19th century and the
beginning of the 20th century, focusing on the work of Léon Walras and on
the Ecole de Lausanne until the 1960s.
Daniele Besomi is senior research fellow at the Centre Walras-Pareto,
University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research centres on the history of
business cycles and crises theories, and his writings include some on the key
metaphors used frequently by writers on the subjects.
Routledge Studies in the History of Economics
Titles include:
Competition, Value and Distribution in Classical Economics
Studies in Long-Period Analysis
Heinz D. Kurz and Neri Salvadori
David Ricardo. An Intellectual Biography
Sergio Cremaschi
Humanity and Nature in Economic Thought
Searching for the Organic Origins of the Economy
Edited by Gábor Bíró
European and Chinese Histories of Economic Thought
Theories and Images of Good Governance
Edited by Iwo Amelung and Bertram Schefold
Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations in Spain
A History of Reception, Dissemination, Adaptation and Application,
1777–1840
Edited by Jesús Astigarraga and Juan Zabalza
Immanuel Kant and Utilitarian Ethics
Samuel Hollander
Neo-Marxism and Post-Keynesian Economics
From Kalecki to Sraffa and Joan Robinson
Ludo Cuyvers
Metaphors in the History of Economic Thought
Crises, Business Cycles and Equilibrium
Edited by Roberto Baranzini and Daniele Besomi
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
series/SE0341
Metaphors in the History of
Economic Thought
Crises, Business Cycles and Equilibrium
Edited by
Roberto Baranzini and Daniele Besomi
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Roberto Baranzini and
Daniele Besomi; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Roberto Baranzini and Daniele Besomi to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baranzini, Roberto, editor. | Besomi, Daniele, 1960- editor.
Title: Metaphors in the history of economic thought: crises, business
cycles and equilibrium / edited by Roberto Baranzini and Daniele Besomi.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series:
Routledge studies in the history of economics | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022014084 (print) | LCCN 2022014085 (ebook) |
Subjects: LCSH: Economics—History. | Metaphor.
Classification: LCC HB75.M46 2023 (print) | LCC HB75 (ebook) | DDC
330.09—dc23/eng/20220323
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014084
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014085
ISBN: 978-0-367-70106-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-70107-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-14460-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003144601
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
Contents
List of contributors vii
Introduction 1
ROBERTO BARANZINI AND DANIELE BESOMI
PART I
Crises 19
1 Economic crises in 19th-century Italy:
a cultural analysis 21
MONIKA POETTINGER
2 Clément Juglar’s epistemic use of metaphors 51
ROBERTO BARANZINI AND DANIELE BESOMI
3 Riders on the storm: W. Stanley Jevons,
meteorology and the analysis of
‘Commercial Fluctuations’ 80
MICHAEL V. WHITE
PART II
Business cycles 121
4 Stitching things together. Marshall on the
economy as an ‘organic whole’ 123
HARRO MAAS
5 Diferentiation, integration, and the great variety of
organisms: biological origins of Werner Sombart’s
business cycle theory 145
MARIUS KUSTER
vi Contents
6 Biological, medical and physical metaphors in Germán
Bernácer’s theory of business cycles (1916–1936) 172
JUAN A. ZABALZA
7 The nature of monetary disturbances in
Austrian and Swedish business cycle theories 187
BERT TIEBEN
8 How economics failed to understand crises.
Constitutive metaphors in business cycle analysis, from
Frisch to Real Business Cycles 210
FRANCISCO LOUÇÃ
PART III
Equilibrium 227
9 The pendulum and equilibrium: a survey 229
DANIELE BESOMI AND SONYA MARIE SCOTT
10 Statistical equilibrium in early 20th-century
Italian economics 265
GIANFRANCO TUSSET
Name Index 285
Contributors
Roberto Baranzini is a professor in economics and in the history and phi-
losophy of economics at the Centre Walras-Pareto for the history of eco-
nomic and political thought at the University of Lausanne. His research
covers the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th
century and focuses on the work of Léon Walras and on the Ecole de Lau-
sanne until the 1960s.
Daniele Besomi is senior research fellow at the Centre Walras-Pareto (Uni-
versity of Lausanne). He has dedicated his studious life to the history of
business cycles and crises theories. His writings include some discussing
specific metaphors frequently used by writers on the subject.
Marius Kuster studied history and economics at the University of Zurich.
He is currently finishing his PhD at the Centre Walras-Pareto (Univer-
sity of Lausanne) in the history of economic thought. In his thesis, Kuster
examines how biological metaphors have been invoked and applied by
German economists in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Francisco Louçã is a full professor of economics at Lisbon University. He
recently published Shadow Networks—Financial disorder and the system that
Caused Crisis (with Michael Ash, 2018, Oxford University Press) and had
previously published The Years of High Econometrics—A Short history of the
Generation that Reinvented Economics (2007, Routledge) and As Time Goes
By—From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution (with Chris
Freeman, 2001, Oxford University Press).
Harro Maas is a professor in the history of economics at the Centre Wal-
ras-Pareto for the history of economic and political thought at the Uni-
versity of Lausanne. He published widely on political economy in the
Victorian period and on the history of economic methods. He is currently
working on the project “Moral Accounting Matters” funded by the Swiss
National Science Foundation (SNSF) that aims to historicize current the-
ories and practices of behavioural governance.
viii Contributors
Monika Poettinger teaches economics and economic history at Polimoda,
Florence, and history of economic thought at the University of Florence.
Her main research interests are entrepreneurial migrations, merchant ethic
in the industrialization process and liberal economic thought.
Sonya Marie Scott is an assistant professor in the Department of Social
Science at York University, Canada. Her research focuses on economic
subjectivity, epistemology, language and economic crises and the history
of economic thought. She is author of Architectures of Economic Subjectivity:
The Philosophical Foundations of the Subject in the History of Economic Thought
(2013) and editor of Languages of Economic Crises (2021).
Bert Tieben is an expert in regulatory economics and economic method-
ology at SEO Amsterdam Economics. He teaches history of economic
thought at Amsterdam University College. His research focuses on the
scientific strife between competing schools of thought in economics. He
has published books on the Austrian school (Austrian Economics in Debate,
Routledge) and the equilibrium theory (The Concept of Equilibrium in Dif-
ferent Economic Traditions, Edward Elgar).
Gianfranco Tusset is professor of history of economic thought at the Uni-
versity of Padua. His research areas are mainly focused on monetary the-
ory in a historical perspective and on text as data.
Michael V. White is an independent scholar who divides his time between
London and Melbourne, Australia. He has published extensively on the
history of economics, with particular attention to 19th-century British
political economy and the work of W. Stanley Jevons.
Juan A. Zabalza holds a PhD in economics and is associate professor in
the Department of Applied Economic Analysis at the University of Alicante
(Spain). His research has focused on economic doctrines, the institutional
development of economics, intellectual history and the relationship be-
tween economic theory and economic policy.
Introduction
Roberto Baranzini and Daniele Besomi
In the midst of the business depression of 1882–1885 and a few months after
the panic of May 1884 in the U.S., an article in the Omaha Daily Bee felicitated
on ‘getting along splendidly with our failures, our curtailments of production,
our reductions of wages, and other economies’ as this would eventually
prepare the country ‘to start anew with a good foundation to work on.’ It
thus wished ‘that the process of natural selection through bankruptcy shall
go on till the weak concerns are all weeded out. The feeble and unpromising
kitten of the litter should be decently drowned and the strong ones left to
thrive’ (Omaha Daily Bee 1884). The article gives no reason why bankruptcies
should prepare a solid ground for business. Resorting to the image of natural
selection, forcefully reinforced with an example of man-made selection, the
author refers the reader (but possibly also himself) to a process, the operation
of which is better understood than that of bankruptcies (the abstract concept of
‘natural selection’ is even further exemplified by the reference to the weeding
out and the kitten). The metaphor is meant to transfer to bankruptcies a
property of natural selection, namely, the elimination of weak individuals
and the survival of the strongest. In current terminology, ‘natural selection’ is
the source of this metaphor, ‘bankruptcies’ are the target, while the properties
to be transferred are the tertium comparationis.
This example comes from a newspaper. The usage of images from outside
the disciplinary source, however, is not limited to popular writings. We find
it almost universally in the economic literature (and also in most other disci-
plines, hard sciences included1): in journal articles, textbooks and treatises;
in the work of the pioneers as well as in the most recent literature; in all
languages; in different uses, in particular as metaphors, analogies, similes or
metonymies. They are applied with different purposes: to take up Hoffman’s
conveniently concise list, scientific metaphors have been shown to serve a
remarkable variety of functions:
1 To suggest new hypotheses, hypothetical concepts, entities, rela-
tions, events, or observation terms,
2 To predict and describe new phenomena or cause-effect relations,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003144601-1
