In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter (Schumpeter 1954a) dismissed Adam Smith's Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976) in a blunt and ad hominem manner. We argue that Schumpeter's assessment resulted from his failure to appreciate the rhetorical structure of...

The present article builds on a background paper that was commissioned for a “Witness Seminar” in 2010 that had a dozen prominent experimental economists -- witnesses, indeed -- discuss the origin and evolution of experimental economics. Rather than providing a history of the experimental...

Conceptual lenses, or models (Allison 1969; Ortmann 2008), draw on stable ways of thinking about the world, or “reasoning routines”. We explore the deep structure of Adam Smith’s work, and to what extent it is the result of a set of “reasoning routines” that, at an early stage of his...

Game theory is a branch of social sciences that formalizes decision-making in situations where two or more individuals or groups interact, possibly having conflicting interests. In Ortmann & Walraevens (2022) we have reconstructed Smith’s ways of thinking about the social world by analyzing...