T. Robert Malthus is usually remembered for the “gloomy presentiments” of the population principle articulated in the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population. Less attention is given to the subsequent editions of the Essay, in which Malthus refined the principle, and...

Once economics came to be understood as the scientific investigation of the operation of markets, economic theorists pushed ethical and metaphysical concerns outside their realm of study. After the separation, the claims of Christian theology had no more jurisdiction over the discipline of...

Robert Malthus was, by his own admission, opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Nevertheless, English proponents of the slave trade, and southern slave owners in the southern United States, appealed to his population principle in their defense. The disconnect between these two statements is a...

One often hears the argument that Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments provides a basis for the construction of a morality independent of a religion based on revelation. Central to this argument is Smith’s impartial spectator, whose study of human motivation through observation of the...

Where should we place Frank Knight in the passage from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism? The argument has recently been made by that Knight should be placed among the group of liberals of an “older generation” that neo-liberals generally, and the Chicago School in particular, separated...

Frank Knight's theory of the entrepreneurial function in modern enterprise is explored in two contexts. The first is the dismissal of the neoclassical theory of business enterprise by Berle and Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property, and their subsequent call for measures that...

Our main contention is that two different re-conceptualizations of liberal democracy took place among Chicago economists in the postwar period. The first emerged out of Frank H. Knight's ruminations in the 1930s on the failures of liberalism. By the 1940s, Knight devoted most of his attention to...

Prepared for the reissue of Frank Knight's <I>The Economic Organization</I> by Transaction Books, which includes both "The Economic Organization" and "Notes of Utility and Cost." The introduction covers the context of Knight's writing his little textbook, its place in the history of Chicago price...</i>

Few economists speak of talk in considering human interaction. Deirdre McCloskey is one who does. The paper considers what it means to take talk seriously, its connection to moral philosophy, and to innovation

A genealogical investigation of Frank Knight's little textbook, lt;Igt;The Economic Organizationlt;/Igt; (lt;Igt;EOlt;/Igt;), which has a history separate from, and perhaps even in tension with, its author. Where did this text come from? What is its history? What essays and manuscripts are its...