Early in the 18th century, before the birth of political economy as a discipline, two of the earliest novels in the English language were published: Robinson Crusoe (1719) by writer and economic entrepreneur Daniel Defoe, and Gulliver's Travels (1726) by the cleric and political adviser Jonathan...

Nicolas Dutot (1684-1741) is an important figure for the history of economic thought, as a pioneer in monetary theory and price statistics, and for economic history as a chronicler of John Law's System. Yet until recently very little about him was known, some of it incorrect. I present extensive...

Richard Cantillon and David Hume both propose the theory of monetary non-neutrality, whereby the money supply changes through the money balances of specific individuals. Such an uneven distribution of monetary change then spreads throughout the economy step by step and changes relative prices....

Nicolas Dutot (1684–1741) is an important figure for the history of economic thought, as a pioneer in monetary theory and price statistics, and for economic history as a chronicler of John Law’s System. Yet until recently very little about him was known, some of it incorrect. I present...

Gordon Tullock denied the scientific status to economics because economists can trade results with the subject of our analysis, e.g., “you can have a low estimate for nothing but a high one will cost you something.” We suppose this to be the fate all disciplines in which the results matter...

Nothing is more common in moral debates than to invoke the names of great thinkers from the past. Business ethics is no exception. Yet insofar as business ethicists have tended to simply mine abstract formulas from the past, they have missed out on the potential intellectual gains in...

John Rae has recently been rediscovered as a precursor of the endogenous growth theory. This study argues that Rae needs to be rediscovered a second time for his original contribution to clarify the role of the innovation and technical change within the economic systems. The aim of this paper is...

This paper looks into the scholastic definitions of the “just price” in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and Bl. John Duns Scotus (1265-1308) and investigates whether they are conceptually different from the current “market price”. A specific focus is on whether government...

Studies of Bernard Mandeville by economists and historians of economic thought have focused overwhelmingly on the problem of situating his work within the development of the theory of laissez-faire and evaluating his influence on major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, especially Adam...

Montchrétien was definitely mercantilist. He praises the ancients, their honors and their self-discipline, but notes, like Serra, that there was no concept of Political Economy in Antiquity. The words, however, appear for the first time in the pseudoaristotelian Oeconomica II, where the...