Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

This paper outlines the development of Hayek's account of the working of decentralised economies, focusing in particular on his move away from using the notion of economic equilibrium towards an emphasis on the notion of 'order'

This paper examines the influence exerted on the thought of F.A. Hayek by the work of the biologist and founder of systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy. It is argued first of all that Bertalanffy provided Hayek with a conceptual framework in terms of which he could articulate the philosophical...

This paper identifies the sources on which Friedrich Hayek drew in order to develop his understanding of the notion of emergence. It is widely acknowledged that the notion of emergence plays a significant role in Hayek’s analyses of both the mind and the market. On Hayek’s account, the key...

Researchers in political science are devoting increasing attention to the ontological commitments of their theories – that is, to what those theories presuppose about the nature of the political world. This article focuses on a recent contribution to this ‘ontological turn' in political...

Two of the most influential concepts in social science over the past two decades have been 'social embeddedness' and 'social capital'. This essay introduces a special issue of the Review of Austrian Economics in which those concepts are examined from the perspective provided by Austrian...

This essays explores various aspects of Tony Lawson's claim that the discipline of economics would benefit from a more explicit, systematic and sustained concern with ontology, that is with (philosophical analysis of) the nature of (what exists in) the social world, than it has hitherto displayed

The discipline of economics can benefit a more explicit, systematic and sustained concern with ontology, that is, with the philosophical analysis of the nature of the social world. Contrary to the argument advanced in an article recently published in Critical Review (Steele 2005), the...

This paper uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this paper that,...