Sandra Peart and David Levy in "The "Vanity of the Philosopher"" champion a concept of "analytical egalitarianism." Equality is a difficult concept. Peart and Levy attempt to reconstruct analytical egalitarianism from the classical writing of British political economy from Adam Smith to John...

This brief survey begins with a suggested procedure for determining whether a given economist viewed a particular goal as an economic or noneconomic objective. Roughly speaking, the approach rests on whether that economist attempted a serious analysis of the tradeoffs between the goal in...