ABSTRACT
Professor Takashi Negishi started his brilliant career of economic research as a general equilibrium theorist. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, he published a series of pioneering mathematical papers on the stability analysis of competitive equilibrium and the general equilibrium approach to monopolistic competition (cf. Negishi 1958, 1961, 1962). In the 1970s, he shifted his attention to the theoretical investigation of the microeconomic foundation of Keynesian macroeconomics by using the mathematical method of general equilibrium analysis, which turned out to be an important predecessor of the ‘New Keynesian’ theory, which came into fashion in the 1980s and the 1990s (cf. Negishi 1979). In the 1980s, he entered into a new area of research, history of economic theory (cf. Negishi 1985, 1989). His method in this area of research is summarized by himself as follows. ‘Past economic theories are considered from the point of view of current economic theories and translated, if possible and necessary, into mathematical models’ (Negishi 1989: xi). Negishi (1985, 1989) applied this method to the theories of past great economists such as Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marx, Mill, Walras, Jevons, Menger, Marshall, Keynes, etc.1
