It is a great honor for me to have this opportunity to speak at this great institution of economic education and research, and on this occasion to honor F. A. Hayek – a scholar who I admire greatly as a man of keen intellect and courage. Hayek’s scholarly career spanned from the 1920s to the...

F. A. Hayek's significant intellectual contribution to a number of scholarly disciplines was grounded in his critique of socialist economics. This article sets out how Hayek's critique of classical and market socialism led to the development of his wide-ranging research programme in the social...

My contention is that political economy as a value-relevant discipline has a legitimate claim on our intellectual attention only to the degree that it is grounded in the value-neutral logic of economic analysis — an analysis that while it cannot determine ultimate values may nevertheless...

In this introduction sketch the architecture of Mises' economics and political economy. Mises' overarching program is one of examining exchange (economic science) and the institutions within which exchange takes place (political economy). In recent years the economics profession has moved...

Richard Wagner's Mind, Society and Human Action is a brilliant exposition of the implications of pursuing the “open” as opposed to “closed” perspective (what he terms neo-Mengerian orientation in contrast with a neo-Walrasian orientation). The closed model brings tractability, but only...

Our focus in this chapter will be on the methodological role that Stigler played in validating what he regarded as the science of economics that he had inherited from his own teacher, Frank Knight, and how this affected his understanding not only of economic theory but also public policy....

In 1989, most economists thought the problem of transition was one of allowing prices to float to market clearing levels. After all one of the most observable problems throughout the former socialist economies was the existence of pervasive shortages. Indeed prices did need to be freed up. But...

Early efforts to tame man’s passions going back to antiquity focused on the repression of those passions. As the political and social sciences emerged, the argumentative focus shifted from repressing to harnessing man's passions. This is what produced the discovery of the "invisible hand"...