Review of Jacob Viner, Lectures in Economics 301, edited by Douglas A. Irwin and Steven G. Medema, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick (USA) and London (UK), pp. 1-158, ISBN: 978-1-41285166-4, Journal of Economic Literature, June 2014.

This review examines Jacob Viner’s Lectures in Economics 301, edited by Steven Medema and Douglas Irwin in 2013, as a valuable contribution to the understanding of how some of the main features of the so called “Chicago School of Economics” took shape. The notes published by Medema and Irwin are a testimony on how microeconomics was taught in the early 1930s by one of the most distinguished (and eclectic) neoclassical economists of the interwar period. While Irwin and Medema mainly focus on the influence of Viner’s course on the following developments of Chicago price theory, our review provides additional analysis on how this course came to be structured and refined and how its role grew in accordance with the shaping of the Chicago Department along the lines of a neoclassical, but still pluralistic, approach to the teaching of economics. In doing so we rely on archival and official sources concerning the teaching offered at Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s.