Carl Menger published Principles of Economics ([1871] 1976) 150 years ago in 1871, and he died 100 years ago in 1921 at the age of 81. Yet, what Joseph Schumpeter said of Menger after his death we could argue is still true today, “Menger is nobody's pupil and what he created stands”...

Drawing inspiration from Ross Emmett's (2006) imaginative construction of what Frank Knight might have thought about the Stigler-Becker formulation of Die Gustibus, I ask what Arthur Lovejoy (1936) might have thought about the origin of public choice. He would surely have denied that public...

This paper is for presentation at a program on the dismemberment of the economics program at the University of Virginia in the mid-1960s. It is a literary flying buttress to “Virginia Political Economy, Rationally Reconstructed.” Where the earlier paper mostly looks forward from 1963, this...

This paper uses the 19th century concern with “the social question” as a vehicle to explore how the theories we use can shape, for better or for worse, our insights into our subjects of interest. Contemporary thinking mostly channels the social question into a focus on inequality in the...

I critically consider four purported economic-efficiency arguments for egalitarian redistribution of income or wealth. (1) Jeremy Bentham's “greatest aggregate happiness” criterion has been used (by Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, A. C. Pigou, Abba Lerner, and more recently...

This paper uses Alfred Marshall’s treatment of wants and activities and Francis Edgeworth’s treatment of utilitarian redistribution to re-examine what since the 19th century has been described as “the social question.” This comparative examination is prefaced by a distinction between...

In 1919, in the wake of the Central Power’s defeat in World War I, Ludwig von Mises published his second book, Nation, State, and Economy. The book explores the consequences of war and the type of political and economic arrangements likely to generate a lasting peace in the future. This paper...

This essay is a response to five essays that collectively constituted a symposium sponsored by Studies in Emergent Order on my 2010 book, Mind, Society, and Human Action: Time and Knowledge in a Theory of Social Economy. This essay offers individual reactions to each of the five contributors...

While Antonio De Viti de Marco was a significant figure within the Italian School of Public Finance that flourished between 1880 and 1940, his theory of public finance also has great significance for contemporary theorizing. Where contemporary theory largely treats states as acting to modify...

Nicholas Vriend (2002) asked whether F.A. Hayek was an “ace,” and answered affirmatively. By “ace,” Vriend meant someone who worked with agent-based modeling. To be sure, Hayek could not have worked with agent-based models because that platform did not exist when Hayek was developing his...