Terence Hutchison and Frank Knight: a reappraisal of their 1940–1941 exchange

Abstract

The person arguably most responsible for the view of Hutchison as the positivist who introduced positivism into economics was Frank Knight. I argue that Knight in 1940 failed to demonstrate that Hutchison was a positivist, at least in the narrow logical positivist sense of the term. By questioning Knight's charge, I aim to challenge the conventional wisdom that identifies ‘Hutchison’ with ‘positivism’. The paper is then a first step in the argument that positivism, even in 1938, played only an inessential role in a consistent methodological position that Hutchison developed alongside his work in the history of economic thought.