Edgeworth's Admissions as Conveyed by L. von Mises As Professor Joseph T. Salerno and Dr. Chris R. Tame made clear in a recent post to this list (HES Digest, vol. 17, Issue 17), Ludwig von Mises may have been a strong fan of F.Y. Edgeworth's economic ideas but he was a tough-minded skeptic about his mathematical methods of analysis. What I learned from this post is that when Mises was invited to prepare (in 1925) a book review of Edgeworth's 3-volume, Papers Relating to Political Economy (PRPE), Mises hunted down and captured two statements that Edgeworth made against the mathematical method. As we say in the court room,"bingo !" Since Edgeworth made these two statements, Mises (who was trained as a lawyer) gave pride of place to what lawyers call "admissions against interest." It is one thing when a sixth grade drop out makes fun of quantitative methods in economics and another thing when the editor of the Economic Journal and the major chairholder at Oxford University does the same! I wish to qualify what Mises claimed in two respects. First, the same PRPE contains other (different) quotations that Mises apparently passed over that presents a somewhat different picture of Edgeworth's regard for his methods of analysis. Second, before we castigate von Mises for a hasty reading of the volumes placed before him for review, we must put part of the blame on Edgeworth himself for camouflaging one of his most important discussions of the mathematical method. My first point: On on p. 274 of the second volume (which is actually p. 273 of my edition), Edgeworth admitted that mathematics is "not an indispensable adjunct to economic studies," which I take to mean that economic studies can survive without using mathematics. I think that is what Mises interpreted Edgeworth as stating also. This essay was written in 1889 and was related to Edgeworth's Presidential Address to Section F of the British Assocation. The opening abstract contained the actual quotation and may have been written much later in 1925 when Edgeworth was rushing this collection to press but the point is, Edgeworth did make that statement. Clearly, Mises is correct. Edgeworth admitted that mathematical reasoning is not absolutely necessary to make progress in economics. But these volumes contain many other essays by Edgeworth other than this early one that Mises cited with what appears to be a hastily added abstract to the front. Certainly, after 1892 when the "Seligman-Edgeworth" debate about the use of modeling assumptions in price theory took center stage, Edgeworth repeatedly pointed to his "taxation theorem" that was subsequently utilized by Hotelling and others (1932) and had a profound influence on modern demand theory as one of his (Edgeworth's) crowning achievements in economics. That theorem was discovered by the mathematical method and was not something that had been discovered in other ways (praxeological reasoning perhaps) and then subsequently retranslated into mathematical symbolism. Edgeworth was both proud of having discovered that when demand curves in two markets are " highly correlated" a tax in one market could affect the final profit-maximizing price in BOTH markets. A totally startling result. Edgeworth cited this result as a counter argument to Seligman's attitude toward the use of calculus in economics [see my article: Moss, 2003. "The Seligman-Edgeworth Debate About the Analysis of Tax Incidence: The Advent of Mathematical Economics, 1892- 1910" History of Political Economy (Summer) : 205-240.] My second point: Edgeworth can share some of the blame for Mises missing these and other quotations. Mises focused mostly on the second volume of Edgeworth's collected papers. In the first volume, there is an essay entitled "Professor Seligman on the Theory of Monopoly." The significance of this essay is not so much the price theoretical material (as important as that was) but what it reveals about Edgeworth's attitudes towards the mathematical method. Edgeworth reprinted his 1899 EJ article with some minor deletions in his PRPE. What is most puzzling is that Edgeworth changed the title of that article in the PRPE. In the EJ, the article is entitled "Professor Seligman on the Mathematical Method in Political Economy." Edgeworth's retitling of that article contributed toward Mises's missing it completely. By removing the term "mathematical method" Edgeworth confused his readers as to what that article was really about. In legal talk, it was the "proximate cause" of Mises's overlooking this discussion completely and skipping forward to the second volume where the earlier more incriminating materials are presented. Did Edgeworth get bolder and more assertive about the mathematical method after Marshall published in Principles in 1890? Did Edgeworth get bolder and more assertive about the mathematical methods after encountering one the most prominent of the American economists refusing to use the calculus in the way prescribed by Edgeworth and therefore reaching "special case" conclusions only? There is so much more to this story and I am delighted that Professors Salerno and Tame are interested in the subject. Larry Moss