Frank H. Knight's classic, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit, became a standard textbook and reference for students at the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and elsewhere from the 1930s until at least the 1950s. Knight never published new or revised editions...

The late Warren J. Samuels saw intellectual history as an integral part of his economic scholarship. As an intellectual history he sought to elucidate a past economist's general theory of economic policy in order to assess the relevance of that policy approach to contemporary settings. For...

In the post-war period, the economics department at the University of Chicago consciously designed an institutional infrastructure to support the application of the analytical tools of price theory, monetary theory and econometrics to the study of competitive markets. Drawing upon a particular...

Economics today is a model building and testing science. But scientific economics was not always understood in terms of models. Economics first emerged as a separate field of scientific study in post-bellum America. The laissez-faire orientation of early American moral philosophy gave way to...

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...

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...