More on Leijonhufvud

6 September 2006 at 8:49 am Nicolai Foss Leave a comment

| Nicolai Foss |

The great economist Axel Leijonhufvud has been the subject of earlier posts here on O&M (here and here). A recent issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics features an article by Elisabetta de Antoni (a colleague of Leijonhufvud at the University of Trento) on “The Auctioneerless Economics of Axel Leijonhufvud: The “Dark Forces of Time and Ignorance” and the Coordination of Economic Activity.”

The article contains some strange claims — e.g., it claims that “Leijonhufvud has the unquestionable merit of having devised the metaphor of the auctioneer” (p. 2) and this auctioneer is the “personification of the (equally occult) ‘invisible hand’ of the market” (p.3) — but there are many interesting observations and points. Thus, it doesn’t over-concentrate on the 1968 book, and nicely tells the story of how Leijonhufvud became increasingly heterodox, as the econ profession since about the mid-1970s moved towards the intertemporal optimization approach that still holds sway. On the whole, the paper is a reliable and informative guide to the thinking of one of the most fascinating contemporary economists.