In 1958 Hirschman's The Strategy of Economic Development irrupted in the development economics scene. His work provided the explanations of the economic development with a new point of view, assessing productive activities by their capacity to inducing new activity. This book also induced in its...

The Austrian economist Othmar Spann (1878-1950) proposes term "universalism" to qualify, in opposition to the "individualism", the doctrine and the method consisting in putting in first totality, society, in the logical order of "functional" analysis of economic facts. Spann applies then this...

The received idea is that he could not miss the science of modernity. But if we investigate what can be considered as the economic thought of Rousseau, we must be distinguish two different lines of thought: one which has to do with the division of labour (to be mostly found in Emile and the...

How do economists defme democracy? Such is the question this paper tries to deal with. We contrast two economists' views on democracy. First, we show how, within the framework of public choice theory, the use of the tools and methodology of mainstream economic analysis, the focus put upon...

The aim of this essay is to describe the concept of self-interest and show how it relates to the idea of the individual as an economic agent, focusing only on Smith's Wealth of Nations. Self-interest is analysed from three different perspectives that highlight its conceptual complexity. The...

The aim of this paper is to trace the evolution of the concept of ''rational consumer'' in Hicks's writings. After being one of the pioneers in the introduction of rationality assumptions about consumer behaviour in economic models, Hicks gradually developed a sceptical view about some of the...

One of the keys to Max Weber's social economics is the evolution of institutional arrangements. In the first part, I show that Weber can be interpreted as an institutional economist. In the second part, I reconstruct the most important features of Max Weber's institutionalism, namely the...

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...

This paper considers the economic policy advocated by Keynes and Friedman in relation to their particular theoretical framework. They have in common an opposition to fine-tuning of the economy. With regard to the contrasting strategies of rules versus discretion, both would be advocates of...

Competition is a keyword in the works of Maurice Allais. From analytical point of view, competition, as differentiated sector with multiple enterprises under perfect competition, coexist with a non-differentiated sector with single nationalized company. Moreover, competition is not spontaneous...