Samuel Hollander

"In recent times Samuel Hollander has been lampooned rather than praised for seeing supply and demand mechanisms everywhere in the classical writers. Even Mark Blaug (1978:66) writes of Hollander as making Smith into more of a Léon Walras than a Ricardo, which I deem not to be a reductio ad absurdum but rather a merited compliment for Smith. (Given their respective dates, we might better compliment Walras for his Smith-like approach to general equilibrium.) Followers of Piero Sraffa or Marx, who are not identical sets, agree in their desire to reject mainstream equilibrium theory. In the sense of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), they want to regard the classical (i.e., the pre-1870) system as an alternative paradigm, a different and better paradigm to the modern ones. That is why they reproach Hollander for claiming to discern supply and demand content in the classical writers and why they prefer a Ricardo to a Smith."