ABSTRACT
The idea that many doctrines have recurred throughout the history of economics seems to me to be accepted within the economics profession. This phenomenon is interpreted as implying that: ‘Ideas will be proposed which are ignored at the time but at some later date are accepted as important to science’ (Stigler 1983: 545). According to this interpretation, we are dealing with men who were ‘writing above their time’ and whose genius was neglected. These individuals are victims of ‘Stigler’s Law of Eponymy’ which states that a discovery is always named after someone who was not the first to discover it (S. Stigler 1980). While not taking issue in any way with the fact that this is an important aspect of the phenomena of recurrence, I intend to draw attention to a somewhat different feature of it. This is the fact that there are economic doctrines which had not been ignored when they appeared, but still dropped from sight only to reappear a number of years later. Many examples of this type of recurrence are well known, and I shall review some of them below. This suggests that it would be interesting to try to find an explanation which would explain, not just the neglect of prescient authors, but also the fact that economic doctrines seem to go through cycles of alternating acceptability and abeyance or even oblivion. Yet no general explanation for this phenomenon has been given by historians of economic thought.
