In this paper our concern is to analyse the historical and logical conditions of possibility of economic agent as a modern figure of the individual. In his Philosophy of Right Hegel shows that if modern individual is able to act as an economic agent, as a Bürger, in the civil society the reason...

The main purpose of this article is to stress the social nature of economic rationality in the works of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. As it will be suggested through some textual evidence, both thinkers believed that individuals and their actions depend on the social, cultural and moral frame...

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...

Provision of last resort facilities cannot be caracterized as temporary deviations from a non inflationary long term predefined growth rate of the money supply. We show that its analytical foundations lie in Thornton's banking theory as the latter introduces a link between credit and money. Bank...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the two anthropological forces of accumulation brought to the fore by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nation (the "desire of bettering our condition" and the "propensity to barter, truck and exchange") should not be considered as innate propensities of...

This article deals with theory of entrepreneurship in Adam Smith's economic thought. Although Smith didn't distinguish the capitalist and the merchant, and didn't precise the entrepreneurial function, one finds however in his writings, characters who carry on the activity of contractor: prudent...

Drawing on Adam Smith's "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" I suggest analysing and further developing my hypothesis that deception is inevitable in the social setting. Smith's agents, who constantly deceive themselves because they cannot look impartially at themselves and others, are compared to...

This article examines Hegel's analysis of the economic system in his mature philosophical work, the Philosophy of Right. It argues that this analysis is not grounded on the adoption and development of classic economic theses but on their dialectic reinterpretation. This particular logic of...

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...

This paper reviews the various types of discourse on the poor and on the relationships between poverty and a number of economic and social institutions that were seen alternatively as either solutions to or causes of poverty. At the beginning of the 19th century, the poor were considered...