Before I respond to James' latest comment, please let me reply to an  
earlier one that I failed to address.

That earlier comment referred to J. S. Mill as a likely influence on,  
and even an intellectual grandfather/inventor of, Marshall's supply- 
and-demand-curve cross diagram. Contrary to James, I doubt Mill's  
relevance in this connection. For Mill never drew the Marshallian  
cross diagram, although he did discuss (in words) the concept of  
supply and demand functions. He can hardly be said to be a precursor  
-- or grandfather/inventor -- of a diagram he never drew. To jump from  
a purely verbal treatment of supply and demand to a geometrical,  
diagrammatic demonstration takes a huge leap of imagination. Mill did  
not take that leap. Marshall did, as did his predecessors Cournot,  
Rau, Mangoldt, and Jenkin. Furthermore, Mill's purely verbal  
discussion pertains not to the determination of the price of an  
individual good, but rather to the determination of the international  
terms of trade between a country's exports and its imports. In  
describing (solely in words) the determination of the relative price  
of imports in terms of exports sacrificed, Mill seems if anything to  
be more a precursor of Marshallian reciprocal demand or offer curve  
analysis than of the Marshallian S&D cross. But again, Mill drew no  
offer curve diagrams. Indeed, he drew no diagrams of any sort in his  
writings on economics. So I think Mill fails to qualify as an inventor  
of S&D geometry, or of any other geometry, for that matter.

Now to James's latest comment. I'm willing to grant that IF (a big if)  
Keynes somehow managed to convince the economics profession to  
attribute the cumulative process analysis to Wicksell, Keynes did so  
inadvertently and unintentionally, not deliberately. I'm just not  
willing to believe that Keynes possessed that much power, namely the  
power to brainwash the entire economics tribe for more than 75 years..  
In short, when economists attach Wicksell's name to the cumulative  
process model, it must be because they think his name fits, not  
because Keynes told them to do so or because they were ignorant of  
earlier formulations. Wicksell's name fits because, in some key  
respects, his version is superior to, or more arresting than, earlier  
ones. His version is perceived as definitive. Perhaps Wicksell's pride  
of place stems from nothing more than his having published an entire  
book and a major article (in English, no less) on the cumulative  
process model,  whereas his predecessors published at best a few  
sentences or paragraphs on the subject. If so, then Wicksell's  
superiority lies in the completeness of his exposition. But no matter  
what the perceived strengths and advantages of his version, those are  
the strengths that must have led economists to name the model for him.  
Keynes had little to do with it.

As for the claim that economists were, and are, ignorant of Wicksell's  
classical predecessors, I can't buy it. Economists understand that all  
thinkers stand on the shoulders of giants whose earlier models are  
prototypes of their own. Therefore economists must have suspected or  
known that Wicksell's cumulative process had predecessors, too. In  
this connection, I doubt that Milton Friedman was ignorant of  
Wicksell's classical forebears. Friedman was a student and later a  
colleague of Jacob Viner, Lloyd Mints, and Frank Knight, three  
scholars whose knowledge of classical economics was unmatched. It  
defies credulity that they didn't inform Friedman (and that he didn't  
discover it himself from his own reading) about classical formulations  
of the cumulative process. One surmises from these considerations that  
Friedman dubbed the analysis Wicksellian not out of ignorance of  
classical versions, but because in his estimation Wicksell's  
formulation was superior to the classical ones.