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...

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...

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...

Over the last thirty years of his life, the Chicago economist Frank H. Knight concentrated his efforts on the elaboration of a new liberalism for the post-war era. Three things were necessary, he argued, to restore health to liberalism. First, free society required an appreciation for the basic...

Two stories currently circulate regarding Frank Knight's relationship to the Chicago School of Economics. The first is a story of tradition, emphasizing the continuity of Chicago economics; the other emphasizes the new beginnings in the post-war period. The second story even implies that the...

Two central figures of the defense of classical liberalism against the onslaught of socialism in the mid-twentieth century were F.A. Hayek and Frank H. Knight. Despite their shared purpose and intellectual common ground, Knight criticized Hayek's understanding of liberalism severely. The paper...

Frank H. Knight's antagonism to religion is well-known, and features prominently in his writings from the 1930s on. But during the 1920s, when he was a professor at the University of Iowa and wrote some of his most important essays on the limitations of economics, Knight was an active...

Introduction to the publication of the correspondence of Frank Knight and Fred Kershner, Knight's longtime mentor and friend. The paper follows the punctuated chronology of the correspondence, covering the early years after their departures from Milligan College, their interaction during their...

Introduction to the publication of the previously unpublished essay "Institutional History and the Classical Economics," by Frank H. Knight. Discusses what the essay tells us about Knight's views about institutionalism and economics around 1930. The proper science of economics, Knight argues in...