Historians of the social sciences and historians of economics have come to agree that, in the United States, the 1940s transformation of economics from political economy to economic science was associated with economists' engagements with other disciplines - e.g. mathematics, statistics,...

Whatever F.A. Hayek meant by "knowledge" could not have been the justified true belief conception common in the Western intellectual tradition from at least the time of Plato onward. In this brief note, I aim to uncover and succinctly state Hayek's unique definition of knowledge.

Sidney Weintraub (1914 - 1983) was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania. A distinguished economic theorist (and the author’s father), he was a co‐founder of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, and the leading figure in the US in the early...

Robert W. Clower's article "The Keynesian Counter - Revolution: A Theoretical Appraisal" (1965) deeply influenced the course of Keynesian macroeconomics by contributing to the transition from IS/LM macroeconomics to fix - price theories. Des pite this influence, no scholar proposed to explain...

In a paper delivered at the December 1955 meeting of the Econometric Society, Paul Samuelson noted that though economists had done "work of high quality and great quantity in the field of taxation," the theory of public expenditure had been "relatively neglected" (1958, 332). Anglo-American...

In 2022, Cambridge University Press is publishing a 50th anniversary edition of Geoff Harcourt’s Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital. There will be two afterwords, preceded with this introduction: You have before you CUP’s 50th anniversary edition of Geoff Harcourt’s Some...

One of the more striking features of the debate over the Coase theorem is the wide variety of models and theoretical frameworks used to discuss, evaluate, or otherwise analyze Coase’s result - an artifact of an ambiguity in Coase’s reasoning. Some framed Coase’s result in a bargaining...

Best known as a monetary economist and prominent proponent of monetarism, Karl Brunner was deeply knowledgeable about the philosophy of science and attempted to explicitly integrate logical empiricist thinking, derived in some measure from his engagement with the work of the philosopher Hans...

This essay reviews new histories of the role of game theory and rational decision-making in shaping the social sciences, economics among them, in the post war period. The recent books The World the Game Theorists Made by Paul Erickson and How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind by Paul Erickson, Judy...