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...

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...

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...

Weber's approach to social scientific methodology and his comparative historical sociology were important resources that Knight drew upon in his efforts to create a social science that transcended the terms of the neoclassical-institutionalist debate during the 1920s and 1930s. The paper...