Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak

American University of Paris · Economics and Management

Whereas later generations portrayed Hugo Grotius as a forerunner of modern theories of international law, the publication of Mare Liberum (1609) offered a grounded argument for free trade against the restrictions imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires. But Grotius’s notion of free trade was far removed from the later ideal of Richar...

Como parte de sus programas de apoyo al desarrollo latinoamericano dentro de la llamada “Guerra Fría Cultural”, los Estados Unidos iniciaron proyectos de cooperación educacional para capacitar cuadros técnicos en diferentes áreas. Discutimos aquí el papel de un gigante de la filantropía internacional – la Fundación Ford – en la creación de la comun...

As part of its support programs for Latin American development within the so-called “Cultural Cold War”, the United States initiated educational cooperation projects to train technical staff in different areas. We discuss here the role of a giant of international philanthropy -- the Ford Foundation -- in the creation of the Brazilian community of a...

In January 1963, distinguished economists from all over the world descended on Rio de Janeiro to discuss the phenomenon of chronic inflation and how it interfered with the developmental prospects of Latin America. A non-exhaustive list of participants included such notable figures as Hollis Chenery, Gottfried Haberler, Arnold Harberger, Roy Harrod,...

Hugo Grotius was a widely read and influential figure in seventeenth-century England. Whereas later generations portrayed him as a forefather to modern theories of natural and international law, the publication of Mare Liberum (1609) offered a grounded argument for free trade against the restrictions imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese colonial e...

The Ford Foundation's involvement with the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. The paper studies how changed political circumstances in the United States and abroad induced the Foundation to gradually abandon the technocratic approach that had governed its ove...

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen was a ‘travelling economist’ in a double sense: after emigrating from Romania in the late 1940s, he became involved with the economic problems of the developing world through his engagement in Vanderbilt University’s Graduate Program in Economic Development. One of his missions brought him multiple times to Brazil between...

Accounts of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s career usually focus on his pioneer contributions to mathematical economics during the 1930s and his later conversion to a critical approach to economic theory anchored on the entropy law. These disparate moments, however, were connected by Georgescu-Roegen’s strong attraction to the study of problems afflict...

In November 1779, the group of Irish militias known as the Volunteers rallied around a statue of King William III in Dublin protesting for free trade between Ireland and Britain. The episode kickstarted a series of political negotiations around the topic that culminated in the abortive proposal for the establishment of a free trade area in 1785. Fr...

Our chapter discusses the myriad ways in which Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (RUP) has been incorporated by different streams of scholarship dedicated to institutional analysis since 1990, when bibliometric evidence indicates a revival of interest in his classic work. Using citation analysis, the authors identify clusters of schol...

Economics as a scholarly discipline was transformed in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, when many countries in the region received financial and academic support from US institutions ostensibly aimed at “modernizing” the standards of training and research in the field. Even though Chile remains the most well-known case, similar development...

The political philosophy of pluralism enjoyed great currency in Britain during the early decades of the 20th century, as an alternative to the extreme poles of individualism and collectivism. Positing the existence of multiple types of political allegiances in any society, pluralism questioned the notion of state sovereignty by advocating that othe...

Standard histories of European integration emphasize the immediate aftermath of World War II as the moment when the seeds of the European Union were first sown. However, the interwar years witnessed a flurry of concern with the reconstruction of the world order, generating arguments that cut across the different social sciences, then plunged in a p...

Accounts of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s career usually focus on his pioneer contributions to mathematical economics during the 1930s and his later conversion to a critical approach to economic theory anchored on the entropy law. These disparate moments, however, were connected by Georgescu-Roegen’s strong attraction to the study of problems afflict...

The paper argues that Robbins inherited from the British classical economists an understanding of the relationship between economics and political economy, where uncertainty played a central role both at the theoretical and at the epistemological levels. From a philosophical perspective, he followed the classical economists’ demarcation between the...

The report briefly discusses some of the main features of an ongoing research project on the institutionalization of economics as an academic discipline in Brazil during the postwar era, with special emphasis on the involvement of North American institutions. The research is heavily based on archival material, including the Ford Foundation records...

Contrary to the situation prevailing in most of Europe and North America, Brazilian economics can be justly described as pluralist, an outcome frequently ascribed to the role played by the Brazilian economics association (ANPEC) as conflict mediator. A crucial episode took place in the early 1970s, when ANPEC chose to welcome the filiation of the h...

Marten Seppel and Keith Tribe, eds., Cameralism in Practice: State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe (Woodbridge/Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2017), pp. 328, $34.95. ISBN: 9781783272280. - Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak

After his escape from communist Romania in the late 1940s, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used to describe himself as an “emigrant from a developing country”. Through his professional engagements with Vanderbilt University, he also came to visit many other parts of the developing world. One of his missions brought him multiple times to Brazil between th...

When compared to the conditions currently prevailing internationally, the history of economics occupies a privileged position within Brazil. After discussing some of the dilemmas that have affected the field over recent decades, the paper examines the distinctive elements that characterize the Brazilian scholarly community. Using a few quantitative...

This a review of the volume Cameralism in Practice: State Administration and Economy in Early Modern Europe, a collection of essay on cameralism edited by Marten Seppel and Keith Tribe.

When compared to the conditions currently prevailing internationally, the history of economics occupies a privileged position within Brazil. After discussing some of the dilemmas that have affected the field over recent decades, the paper examines the distinctive elements that characterize the Brazilian scholarly community. Using a few quantitative...

After his escape from communist Romania in the late 1940s, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen used to describe himself as an “emigrant from a developing country”. Through his professional engagements with Vanderbilt University, he also came to visit many other parts of the developing world. One of his missions brought him multiple times to Brazil between th...

The political philosophy of pluralism enjoyed great currency in Britain during the early decades of the 20th century, as an alternative to the extreme poles of individualism and collectivism. Positing the existence of multiple types of political allegiances in any society, pluralism questioned the notion of state sovereignty by advocating that othe...

要 《1864—1865年经济学手稿》中,马克思开创了危机理论许多方面的 研究先河。关于1866年危机的草稿和笔记本进一步呈现出马克思危机理论的主要 轮廓。在编辑工作中,恩格斯意识到了客观事物本身发生的变化以及马克思19世 纪60年代所作文本的后续结论。尽管留有遗憾,恩格斯仍然抓住了《资本论》把 握资本主义生产方式更为普遍的特征之目的。

The early 1620s trade crisis had a significant influence on the way public opinion in England regarded economic issues, and the pamphlets written during that period convey the impression that the supply of money was the undisputed primary concern of economic policy. However, monetary matters occupied a prominent position in the political agenda of...

The early decades of the 20th century witnessed much discussion about the separation between positive and normative analysis, and the legitimacy of the prescriptive claims often advanced by social scientists. The paper investigates British debates about the reconstruction of the world order as a topic that brought together social analysts with very...

In the second edition of his methodological Essay, Lionel Robbins attributes a significant role to uncertainty, dynamics and the time element. Understanding the motives that led to these revisions may offer important clues to assess what happened to political economy ever since, and how far economics has diverged from Robbins’ agenda. Our main clai...

Lionel Robbins' definition of economics helped to buttress the centrality that individual choice acquired after the Second World War. This, however, was an unintended consequence of his seminal work. Underlying his definition of economics, a novel approach to methodological individualism is advanced, in which the isolated individual plays the role...

The development of academic economics in Brazil received a major boost during the 1960s, when US institutions such as USAID and the Ford Foundation began to fund the first graduate programs in the field. An important moment occurred in 1973 with the creation of ANPEC, the national association responsible for promoting institutional interaction amon...

Accounts of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s career as an economist usually focus either on the brilliance of his pioneer contributions to mathematical economics during the 1930s, or more frequently, on his later conversion to a critical approach to economic theory anchored on the centrality of the entropy law in a dynamic setting. These two disparate m...

The early decades of the 20th century in Europe witnessed a wealth of discussion on the epistemology of the social sciences. Not only were the boundaries between different disciplinary fields being redrawn, but also the nature of scientific knowledge about human and social affairs came under careful scrutiny. One prominent issue in debate was the s...

The early 1620s trade crisis had a significant influence on the way public opinion in England regarded economic issues, and the pamphlets written during that period convey the impression that the supply of money was the undisputed primary concern of economic policy. However, monetary matters only occupied a prominent position in the political agend...

Economics as a scholarly discipline in Latin America was transformed during the 1960s and 1970s, when many countries in the region received financial and academic support from U.S. institutions ostensibly aimed at “modernizing” the standards of training and research in the field. Even though Chile remains the most well-known case, similar developme...

Though contemporaries, Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart are commonly portrayed as men belonging to different eras. Whereas Smith went down in history both as founder of Classical Political Economy and patron of economic liberalism, Steuart became known as the last, outdated advocate of mercantilist policies in Britain. Smith himself was responsible...

The political emancipation of Latin America is a historical phenomenon charged with symbolic meanings, closely related as it was to some of the most consequential events in modern history, such as the French Revolution, the ascent of British hegemony, and the collapse of the ancien régime. As usual in cases of this nature, we tend to create an imag...

Brazilian academic economics has been traditionally characterized by its openness to different strands of economic theory. In contrast to the standards prevailing in most of Europe and North America, economics in Brazil can be justly described as pluralistic, with competing schools of thought enjoying relatively secure institutional positions. One...

Although historians usually trace its origins to the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th Century, Latin American political, economic and cultural emancipation is still very much a work in progress. As new national identities were developed, fresh reflection and theorising was needed in order to understand how Latin America related to the wider worl...

Drelichman Mauricio and Voth Hans-Joachim , Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 328, $35 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-691-15149-6. - Volume 38 Issue 2 - Carlos Eduardo Suprinyak

Robbins belongs to the prehistory of microfoundations, for his definition of economics helped to buttress the centrality that individual choice acquired after the Second World War. This, however, was an unintended effect of his seminal Essay. Our claim is that, underlying his definition of economics, a novel approach to methodological individualism...

This paper assesses Robbins' participation in the Economic Advisory Council in 1930, drawing mostly on The Lionel Robbins Papers held at the LSE. The divergences between him and Keynes are highlighted and an attempt is made to shed some light on Robbins' overarching interest on the interplay of economics as a science and political economy as a broa...

The Ford Foundation’s initial effort to assist in the development of the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. Given the Foundation’s expressed goal of fostering research that was of potential relevance for public policy, the Brazilian political context posed a...

The 1960s saw the beginning of an effort to improve professional standards in Brazilian academia through cooperation with a few North American institutions, in the context of an important and controversial set of agreements between the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In the c...

During the early 1620’s, a wide-ranging public debate took place in England in order to investigate the causes behind a commercial crisis that severely affected the kingdom. Using a wide array of primary sources, the paper shows that the disputes among Malynes, Misselden, Mun, and others within the context of this debate led to the consolidation of...

Robbins belongs to the prehistory of microfoundations, for his definition of economics helped to buttress the centrality that individual choice acquired after the Second World War. This, however, was an unintended effect of his seminal Essay. Our claim is that, underlying his definition of economics, a novel approach to methodological individualism...

The Ford Foundation’s initial effort to assist in the development of the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. Given the Foundation’s expressed goal of fostering research that was of potential relevance for public policy, the Brazilian political context posed a...

The parliament of 1621 witnessed extensive debating of economic issues by those engaged in finding solutions for the exacting crisis which affected England at the time. These proceedings offer the background against which some of the most relevant economic literature of the period was produced. As debates progressed, two contrasting perspectives gr...

The parliament of 1621 witnessed extensive debating of economic issues by those engaged in finding solutions for the exacting crisis which then affected England. These proceedings offer the background against which some of the most relevant economic literature of the period was produced. As debates progressed, two contrasting perspectives gradually...

The 1960s saw the beginning of an effort to improve professional standards in Brazilian academia through cooperation with a few North American institutions, in the context of an important and controversial set of agreements between the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In the c...

This paper presents Notebook B113, one of Marx’s unpublished manuscripts, and suggests its importance for highlighting the monetary and financial issues which Marx was investigating after 1867. The contents of this notebook reveal a systematic effort to investigate new features of financial markets and institutions which were spreading throughout E...

This paper proposes to approach the economic ideas which prevailed in England during the early 17th century by moving beyond the historical and analytical exegesis of the printed pamphlets of the time, and focusing instead on the intellectual perspectives brought to bear upon economic matters by three of the most prominent public figures of late Ja...

O presente artigo oferece novas perspectivas em relação ao comércio de tropas de muares no Brasil imperial, utilizando a herança documental da barreira de Itapetininga — parte do sistema de arrecadação dos direitos sobre animais da Província de São Paulo. Após discutir as estimativas elaboradas até hoje e as características da documentação da barre...

The catharsis produced by the early 1620’s trade crisis had a significant impact on the way economic themes were regarded by public opinion in England. As a result, those who analyze the ideas put forward in the documents written during that period – be they printed pamphlets or official memoranda – are left with the impression that an adequate sup...

During the early 1620’s, England went through a period of intense economic disorders which sparked the interest of many in economic reasoning. The decade witnessed the emergence of the most relevant pieces of economic literature of the early Stuart era, but the debate was not restricted to the abstract confrontation of economic writers. The fundame...

This paper presents Notebook B113, one of Marx’s unpublished manuscripts, and suggests its importance for highlighting the monetary and financial issues which Marx was investigating after 1867. A combination of deciphering an index prepared by Marx and reading the 1868 editions of The Economist and The Money Market Review may help to improve the un...

Economic pamphleteering in England during the early 17th century has often been described as an attempt to influence the course of public policy with the aim of either protecting vested interests or else promoting in earnest the adoption of a few mercantilist doctrines. However, these judgments pass over a more basic question: to what extent, if an...

Starting from Evangelista Torricelli's pneumatic discoveries, we try to show that the crucial discoveries in pure science associated with the Scientific Revolution, although they may not have found immediate practical applications, have markedly impelled technological progress in the medium term - contrary to the diffused notion which states that t...

Em seus escritos sobre a "governamentalidade", Foucault argumenta que a filosofia política, durante o início do período moderno, perpetrou uma mudança gradual no objeto de exercício do poder, deixando de lado o território para concentrar-se sobre a população. Neste artigo, buscamos associar essa idéia com o pensamento econômico britânico do século...

In his lectures on governmentality, Foucault argued that Early Modern Period's political theorizing was characterized by a gradual change in the object of political power, from territories to populations. We try to link this idea to the development of seventeenth-century British economic thought, in which notions of population management are consta...

Using the unexplored documental inheritage from two of São Paulo’s province tax outposts, Rio Negro and Itapetininga, this work analyses the structure of the commercializing system for cargo animals – mules and horses – established between imperial Brazil’s southern and south-central regions. The analysis covers the period from 1830 to 1869 and cap...

When evaluating theoretical systems of the past, one is frequently misled by tacitly identifying yesterday's theoretical concepts with those currently prevailing, a problem made more serious when dealing with ideas which predate the full consolidation of a discipline. Studies of mercantilistic doctrine use to be tainted by such difficulties. In the...

Using unexplored sources from Curitiba’s (1765-66) and Sorocaba’s (1779-82) tax outposts, we analyse the cattle market between southern and central areas in colonial Brazil. We present the volume of cattle negotiated in perspective with other similar evidence available, thus establishing the market’s evolutionary tendencies, with special emphasis o...

Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é atualizar o debate em torno da inserção dos animais de carga criados no extremo sul do Brasil dentro do mercado interno mineiro ao longo dos séculos XVIII e XIX. Para tanto, trabalhamos com conjuntos documentais inéditos relacionados ao período imperial, elaborados por diversas unidades fiscais paulistas e mineiras...