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...

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...

In this article, we aim to highlight the main lines of Walter Lippmann's project of rebuilding liberalism in his book The Good Society (1937a). First we expose the historical context and the author's overall trend of thought. Then we deal with what seems to us to be the striking figure of his...

There is not a single classical approach to the lender of last resort, but several classical approaches to the lender of last resort. They have been successively developed by Baring, Thornton, the Banking School, Bagehot and Hawtrey. If these approaches converge in stressing that the lender of...

This paper highlights Thornton's criticisms of Adam Smith along with his lender of last resort analysis'. It suggests that there are three Mr. Thorntons who appear in Paper Credit. The first is the concerned antideflationist of the first section of the book. The second is the worried...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is rarely mentioned in the history of economic thought. For a long time his criticism of market economy has been described as a defense of an agricultural society with no relation with the outer world that could even be considered as anchored in the past. Maybe one of the...

Power is the core of Hobbes' analytical device. He defines it as a actual capacity to obtain an apparent good in the future and analyses it, from a nominalist point of view, as power of a man on another man. For Hobbes, power's returns are increasing, the research of power has no other limits...

In this contribution I question the expression “economical philosophy” as an association of opposed terms which cannot be defined without referring to each other beforehand. Because of this original intertwining of philosophy and economics, philosophical reason is as bounded as economical...

This paper suggests that Amartya Sen’s conception of rationality could benefit from insights borrowed to John Searle’s philosophy of mind. More precisely I argue that the work of Searle on intentionality provides a relevant conceptual apparatus to strengthen Sen’s conceptualization of...