No other phrase has been as widely and as controversially used in the discussion of capitalism and markets as the ‘invisible hand', a metaphor that Adam Smith used just once in each of his major works. There has been a debate as to whether Smith himself attached any importance to this...

Adam Smith hat in seinem Bild des Menschen der Rolle der Imagination einen so großen Stellenwert eingeräumt, dass es berechtigt ist, ihn als Bildanthropologen zu bezeichnen. Der Aspekt des Bildvermögens von Menschen geriet im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Geschichte der Wirtschaftstheorie...

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...

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...

Dieser Aufsatz reflektiert das Verständnis von Mensch und Natur, welches dem Denken von Malthus zugrunde liegt und kontrastiert es mit dem völlig anderen Verständnis seines Zeitgenossen William Wordsworth. Wir zeigen, dass die ökonomischen Überlegungen beider entscheidend durch diese...

In this paper the view of humankind and nature upon which the thinking of Malthus is founded will be reflected on and contrasted with the opposed understanding of his contemporary Wordsworth. We show that the economic considerations of both are based decidedly on the premise of these views, and...

This paper challenges the commonly held view that Smith's moral theory is a subjectivist theory. Smith's test for goodness and rightness - for propriety - is not the approbation of an impartial spectator, but the warranted approbation of such a spectator. Something is right or good not because...

Lewis argued that his 1954 model of economic development in a dual economy was based on the classical framework originally advanced by Smith, Malthus, Ricardo and Marx. The present paper provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis adopted and adapted classical concepts such as...

Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith’s theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith’s notion of value, his understanding of the...