An Utterly Incomplete Look at Research from 1923

This series looks at research from years past. I survey a handful of books and articles in a particular year from math, economics, philosophy, international relations, and other interesting topics. This project was inspired by my retrospective on Foreign Affairs' first issue from September 1922, which received a lot of positive feedback and was quite enjoyable to research and write. In 2024, I will look back at research from 1774, 1824, 1874, and 1924, so stay tuned.

1823 - 1873 - 1923

The aftermath of the First World War motivated a flurry of research across the humanities and sciences. Practical problems such as how currencies should be managed in light of devaluation and indebtedness and how states should communicate with one another to resolve disputes gave impetus to new ways of thinking about the economy, the structure of society, and the international order. What should be the focus of central banks? What should be the government’s role in the economy or society in general? How can we best utilize progress in the natural and social sciences to diminish the possibility of future war and improve the quality of life? This is the single greatest thread that unites many of the selections below. Keynes’ A Tract on Monetary Reform and Zimmern’s Nationalism and Internationalism are prime examples.

A secondary thread concerns logical analysis. Analytic philosophy and pragmatism offered new perspectives on old problems with some such as Ogden and Richards viewing the big questions as mere problems of communication. Work in mathematical logic sought to put mathematical reasoning on firmer foundations for example with von Neumann’s formulation of the ordinal numbers and Brouwer’s motivation for a constructive mathematics.

In many ways, research from 1923 differs in degree rather than in kind from research today. Many of today’s top journals in the English-speaking world such as Nature, Mind, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics were by then well-established. Though citation practices were occasionally non-existent, papers now and then are similarly formatted.

The most glaring difference is in the style of reasoning. Today, much research is heavily mathematized even if the use of formal modeling is more style than substance. In contrast, much work in the early twentieth century employed a verbal reasoning style, even in papers that explicitly dealt with mathematical models such as when solving for an equilibrium in economics.

Economics
A Tract on Monetary Reform by John Maynard Keynes
Adam Smith, 1723 and 1923 by James Bonar
The Theory of International Values Re-Examined by Frank D. Graham
The Ethics of Competition by Frank H. Knight

Philosophy
The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards
Critical Notice of L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Frank Ramsey
A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori by C. I. Lewis
The Unity of Science: An Outline by Howard R. Moore
Vagueness by Bertrand Russell
The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality by Arthur O. Lovejoy
Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences by George H. Mead

Math
On the Introduction of Transfinite Numbers by John von Neumann
On the Significance of the Principle of Excluded Middle in Mathematics by L. E. J. Brouwer

International Relations
Nationalism and Internationalism by Alfred E. Zimmern
Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State by Robert L. Hale
Ethics and International Relations by John Dewey

Other Topics
The Rise of Universities by Charles Homer Haskins
The Natural History of the Newspaper by Robert E. Park
The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud

Economics

A Tract on Monetary Reform

Author: John Maynard Keynes

Link: Internet Archive

In the aftermath of the First World War, European countries grappled with how to restructure their public finances. The regime of fixed exchange rates through the gold standard had been upended both to finance the war effort and shoulder reparations.

This short book advances the view that central banks would be better served by focusing on price stability rather than stabilizing the rate of exchange with an external store of value such as dollars or gold. Keynes argues against Britain and others returning to a gold standard as well as attempting to deflate their currency to pre-war levels if they do return.

The book is structured in three parts. The first two chapters are a primer on inflation, exchange rates, and public finance. The third chapter informally introduces theoretical models such as the quantity theory of money, purchasing power parity, and forward contracts. It’s here that we find the most well-known passage of the book (and of Keynes for that matter) while commenting on the utility of equilibrium models in the short term:

“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

Chapters four and five survey the current debate and outline Keynes’ preferred scheme. While Keynes advises against the gold standard, neither does he support a system of floating exchange rates. Rather, he supports a system where exchange rates are governed by guardrails that adjust at regular intervals by central bankers.

This is a readable book that balances technical material and lay discussion well. It seems the audience is meant to be policymakers and readers of publications such as Foreign Affairs.

Adam Smith, 1723 and 1923

Author: James Bonar

Publication: Economica

Link: JSTOR

This short paper reflects on Adam Smith’s legacy on his two hundredth birthday. Smith’s French translator said in 1802 that the initial theory-focused books of the Wealth of Nations would gain the readers’ attention at the expense of the later applied books. The author contends that the situation is quite reversed in 1923. While the analysis of policies is far from contemporary, Smith’s style builds an economic way of thinking in the reader that has inspired generations of economists. There are several symposia this year on Adam Smith at 300 such as at the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

The Theory of International Values Re-Examined

Author: Frank D. Graham

Publication: The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Link: JSTOR

Graham argues that the narrowly defined classical models of international trade are too simplistic and lead to faulty conclusions. Graham presents these as detailed in John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) and refined in Charles Bastable’s The Theory of International Trade, with some of its applications to economic policy (1887).

The simplicity of models largely results from only considering trade between two countries and two commodities. Through a series of examples, Graham introduces both additional countries and additional commodities into the model. The increased complexity is reflected in the complexity of equilibrium solutions i.e. the bundles of goods at which all countries are willing to produce and trade. These equilibria do not always exhibit properties of the two country-two commodity model such as smaller countries gaining more from trade than larger countries.

While the author offers several numerical examples, the style of reasoning is largely verbal rather than mathematical. Solving for equilibrium solutions is a sort of round robin operation of considering how one country would react to others’ willingness to trade.

The Ethics of Competition

Author: Frank H. Knight

Publication: The Quarterly Journal of Economics

Link: JSTOR

This is a long-winded paper that examines the ethical foundations of a society ordered by competition. With the unfettered competition in the models of the classical economists, such a society tends to satisfy the desires of the members of society to the greatest possible extent. Knight argues extensively that the situation which obtains in reality is far from the ideal case and that the many deviations greatly diminish the prospects of economically efficient outcomes. This is not to pass judgement on competition in general; Knight holds that “radical critics of competition as a general basis of the economic order generally underestimate egregiously the danger of doing vastly worse.”

The second section considers various fairness criteria by conceiving of market competition as a game which balances luck, skill, and effort. The final section compares competition as a utilitarian ethical ideal to Aristotelian and Christian ethics. While the former seeks perfection through the Eudiamonistic account of the good life, the latter is focused on cultivating permissible motives and intents for one’s behavior.

Philosophy

The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism

Authors: C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards

Link: Internet Archive

This book is an ambitious (surely an overly ambitious) attempt at a theory of meaning and communication. The primary model is a relation between a thought, a sign, and a referent. People communicate with one another through signs whether verbal, written, or otherwise. To use speaking as an example, words symbolize a thought from the speaker which makes reference to things in the world. The listener, however, does not have access to the speaker’s thought and so must infer the referent from the speaker’s words. This is the problem of communication.

Ogden and Richards introduce several interesting ideas. Let’s consider two: unique reference and the emotive mode of communication. The former is the idea that each sign corresponds to a unique reference i.e. there exists a one to one correspondence between signs and things in the world. That this proposition is false shows that the problem of communication is not trivial.

The latter is the idea that not all communication is meant to refer to things in the world. For instance, from the sentence “this poem is beautiful”, one may infer that there is a thing in world which their interlocutor refers to by “beautiful”; however, the authors contend that the interlocutor may be expressing a feeling rather than referencing something. Communication in reality often involves the signifying mode and the emotive mode simultaneously.

The authors overreach by claiming that their analysis of communication dissolves many philosophical problems in much the same way as the logical positivists a decade later as described in A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic.

Critical Notice of L. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Author: Frank Ramsey

Publication: Mind

Link: JSTOR

This is Frank Ramsey’s review of the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922). At the time, Wittgenstein was seen as brilliant but incomprehensible, and Ramsey was a promising student just out of undergrad at Cambridge. Interestingly, Ramsey assisted C. K. Ogden with the Tractatus’ translation.

While Ramsey acknowledges that the Tractatus is an important philosophical work with implications stretching to any intellectual endeavor, this review argues that many notions employed by Wittgenstein are unclear at best and confused at worst. Much of the analysis attacks the Tractatus’ internal consistency rather than by relating it to other work. This makes writing about this review difficult without referencing much of the notoriously terse Tractatus.

Bertrand Russell wrote the introduction to the book. Ramsey notes that Russell’s comments do not always match up to what Wittgenstein is claiming. In particular, Russell limits the scope of the Tractatus to a “logically perfect language” whereas Ramsey reads Wittgenstein as also considering “ordinary languages”.

A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori

Author: C. I. Lewis

Publication: The Journal of Philosophy

Link: JSTOR

A fruitful way of divvying up knowledge is into what is known independent of experience and that which requires experience i.e. a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Many accounts of the a priori hold that such knowledge does say something about the world; however, these accounts often require a mystical faculty of intuition to explain the possibility of such knowledge.

This paper offers an account of the a priori where one’s conceptual faculties are to some extent the product of one’s environment and evolves (or devolves) over time.

“Our categories and definitions are peculiarly social products, reached in the light of experiences which have much in common, and beaten out, like other pathways, by the coincidence of human purposes and the exigencies of human cooperation. Concerning the a priori there need be neither universal agreement nor complete historical continuity.”

Part of science, then, and rational inquiry more generally is refining our concepts in ways that become more useful. On this conception, the “dividing line between the a priori and the a posteriori is that between principles and definitive concepts which can be maintained in the face of all experience and those genuinely empirical generalizations which might be proven flatly false.”

The Unity of Science: An Outline

Author: Howard R. Moore

Publication: The Monist

Link: JSTOR

This paper introduces the notion of the unity of science as a program of intertheoretic reduction. The idea is to reduce the various siloed sciences down to more basic sciences e.g. reducing chemistry to physics or psychology to biochemistry to produce a unified whole.

The paper is structured by surveying the state of a science and how it is integrated with proceeding sciences beginning with physics, then continuing to chemistry, biology, and the social sciences. What’s surprising in this presentation is just how similar the presented worldview is to that of modern science. With some obvious caveats - e.g. the neutron wouldn’t be postulated until 1932 - the survey of the natural sciences reads much like a gloss of first-year biology, chemistry, and physics today. Coverage of the social sciences, however, is rather dated.

The author appears highly optimistic about the prospects of the unity of science. Part of this optimism stems from his view of the plasticity of the present best theories:

“It is not improbable, therefore, that present theories of atomic structure are but condensed summaries of experimental results obtained. Complexity of theory is in direct ratio to the finesse of experimental technique.”

Vagueness

Author: Bertrand Russell

Publication: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Link: Click here

This article discusses the inherent vagueness in human concepts. For instance, all measurement concepts such as second, inch, or gram must be imprecise to some degree in application. The takeaway is that we should not mistake properties of our language or psychology with metaphysical properties of nature.

We may think that the vagueness only applies to natural language constructions; however, Russell argues that it even comes about when modeling nature with a formal logic. Due to human psychology, the notions of truth and falsity can be fuzzy.

Russell advances a definition of vagueness as the absence of accuracy. A concept or representation is accurate if there is a one-to-one correspondence between the representation and the object to be represented. A concept is then vague if that relation is one-to-many.

The Supposed Primitivism of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality

Author: Arthur O. Lovejoy

Publication: Modern Philology

Link: JSTOR

A common belief among commentators of Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality is his “glorification of the state of nature” which is roughly taken to be the situation of early humans. The author argues that this is due largely to a persistent conflation of the meaning of the “state of nature”.

Rousseau offered an outline of history prior to the formation of the modern state (though it is likely not meant to be historical). The first stage is that of early humans; the second sees the development of tools and communication; the third is a sort of hunter-gatherer society; and the fourth has enough capital accumulation to necessitate the modern state.

While commentators locate Rousseau’s state of nature with the first state, the author contends it is rather with the third. In this condition, Rousseau holds, man has enough freedom and abundance to be happy yet is not burdened by the advent of the modern state. This conflation becomes more reasonable when one considers that Voltaire and Pufendorf identify the state of nature with the first stage, Montaigne and Pope roughly agree with Rousseau, and Hobbes’ “war of all against all” is located in the fourth stage.

Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences

Author: George H. Mead

Publication: International Journal of Ethics

Link: JSTOR

This paper considers the degree to which the natural sciences can guide and inform the moral sciences. Unlike much natural phenomena, social phenomena involve complex interactions with human psychology and its stubborn attachment to various norms. On a more practical level, however, science is backward looking, while public policy is made toward future ends.

Mead considers vaccination as an example - one that is as prescient in 1923 as in 2023. The methods of science produce vaccines and improvements in hospitals, but their widespread adoption requires balancing the perceived costs and benefits with other social norms.

The second half of the paper is an analysis of so-called cult values. For instance, the cult value of nationalism inhibits the prevention of war by scientific interventions. Mead suggests we can reach better outcomes by channeling cult values into positive ends. Obviously, they can be channeled into negative ends as well!

One reservation I have is the author’s naiveté with respect to the certainty of scientific findings. In some sense, the scientific enterprise is treated as a black box which churns out truths.

Math

On the Introduction of Transfinite Numbers

Author: John von Neumann

Original Title: Zur Einführung der transfiniten Zahlen

Publication: Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum (in German)

Translated in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, edited by Jean van Heijenoort

Link: Internet Archive

In set theory, the ordinals are a generalization of the natural numbers as indices. This allows us to extend the notion of “what comes next in an ordering” to the infinite case. This paper introduces a canonical construction of ordinals, now called the von Neumann ordinals. These are defined as follows: $0 = \{ \}, 1 = \{ 0 \}, 2 = \{ 0, 1 \}, \ldots$ and, in general, $\beta = \{ \alpha \mid \alpha < \beta \}$. The finite ordinals correspond with the natural numbers. The first infinite ordinal $\omega$ comes after all the natural numbers and is the set of all finite ordinals. Next comes $\omega + 1, \omega + 2$, and so on.

Von Neumann shows how this construction of the ordinals arises from the notions of a well-ordered set and order-equivalence. While this may appear a strange starting point, Cantor’s work in the late nineteenth century used equivalence classes of well-ordered sets as ordinals. Von Neumann’s ordinals provide convenient representatives for these equivalence classes. The remainder of the article prove basic properties of the ordinals.

My biggest takeaway from reading this is how dramatically the notation in set theory has improved. Though just a few pages long, I found myself flipping back several times in frustration comparing symbols.

On the Significance of the Principle of Excluded Middle in Mathematics, especially in Function Theory

Author: L. E. J. Brouwer

Original Title: Über die Bedeutung des Satzes vom ausgeschlossenen Dritten in der Mathematik, insbesondere in der Funktionentheorie

Publication: Journal für die reine und angewandte Mathematik

Translated in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, edited by Jean van Heijenoort

Link: Internet Archive

The Law of Excluded Middle (LEM) is a logical principle which says that every sentence is either true or false with respect to some formal language. Typically, we assume that LEM holds in mathematics. Doing so allows for the common strategy of non-constructive existential proofs i.e. assume some object $x$ doesn’t exist, derive a contradiction, then conclude that $x$ exists without necessarily knowing how to obtain or construct $x$.

Brouwer argues that LEM is reasonable for finite mathematics, but problems arise when extending mathematics to the infinite. Mathematics without LEM would later be called intuitionism, though Brouwer does not use that phrase here. To show that this is consequential, he proves that several theorems of real analysis do not hold without LEM such as the Bolzano–Weierstrass theorem, the Extreme Value theorem, and the Heine-Borel theorem.

International Relations

Nationalism and Internationalism

Author: Alfred E. Zimmern

Publication: Foreign Affairs

Link: Click Here

Nationalism and Internationalism are often seen as contrary ideas. This article contends that this seeming conflict is not necessary but results from a widely held nineteenth century liberal doctrine: nations should coincide with states. Whereas a state is roughly a territory with a sovereign government, a nation is a product of human group psychology. Zimmern offers the following provisional definition of the latter: “a nation is a body of people united by a corporate sentiment of peculiar intensity, intimacy and dignity, related to a definite home-country.”

The difference between states and nations isn’t simply a matter of semantics. While it is held that the First World War was caused by excessive nationalism in Europe, Zimmern holds that the cause was primarily poor interstate relations and that nationalism is not inherently bad. The problems of the melting pot of North America, however, stems from nationalism.

While particular aspects of this article are dated, much of it feels contemporary and may shed light on domestic and international issues today. This article was included in the Council on Foreign Relations’ list of best articles from the first century of Foreign Affairs.

Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non-Coercive State

Author: Robert L. Hale

Publication: Political Science Quarterly

Link: JSTOR

While the Law and Economics program is usually associated with the University of Chicago in the 1970s, a prior Law and Economics movement occurred in the US during the first half of the twentieth century. This paper, which analyzes the notion of coercion in society through an extended critique of Thomas Nixon Carver’s Principles of National Economy (1921), belongs to this earlier program.

Hale challenges the laissez-faire view that property laws are part of a society free from coercion. For instance, on Hale’s view, the institution of property coerces propertyless individuals to sell their labor to obtain enough food and such to subsist. Any public policy that affects the distribution of income in the presence of property rights merely shifts who is subject to coercion and to what extent. Perhaps, the important takeaway here is that property is more complex than a simple negative right.

Ethics and International Relations

Author: John Dewey

Publication: Foreign Affairs

Link: Click Here

In the not-so-distant past, Europeans conformed to some version of Christian ethics, broadly conceived. This natural law framework provided a common backdrop for both domestic and foreign dealings. The nineteenth century, however, saw the shared framework erode with increased secularization in worldly affairs. These more secular moral theories, which filled the void, include utilitarianism and Hegelianism.

Dewey argues that there has been a divergence between how contemporary ethics are applied domestically and internationally. Utilitarianism, for instance, is “a theory not only of the moral standard but also of the moral motive, namely, concern for the general happiness.” A product of human psychology is that we often weigh more heavily the happiness of our fellow countrymen and such. In this sense, one may support utilitarian policies at home but war abroad. The latter of which is surely not maximizing global happiness. Dewey advocates for strengthening international law and making war between states illegal as a start to bridge the divide. This was accomplished to some extent by the Paris Pact in 1928.