The social encyclical Rerum Novarum closely links the question of poverty with that of property, and invokes Thomas Aquinas. But on closer examination, the reasoning developed in favour of property departs from the scholastic thinker, since it maintains more affinities with the liberal tradition...

Hayek founds his liberalism on the notion of order, principally used to construct his theory of spontaneous market order. After discussing the importance and the ambiguities of the distinction between spontaneous orders and organized orders, we show that one of the great weaknesses of this...

The Italian economist Enrico Barone (1859- 1924) is best known for his contributions to marginal productivity theory and the socialist planning debate. This paper analyzes Barone’s contributions to the theory of perfect competition which are largely ignored in the secondary literature. It...