Following Foucault's analysis of German Neoliberalism (Ordoliberalism) and his thesis of ambiguity, this paper introduces a two-level distinction between individual and regulatory ethics. In particular, its aim is to reassess the importance of individual ethics in the conceptual framework of...

Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is often read as a policy book and a political tract for its time. It is also often read as little more than a “slippery slope” argument, leading inevitably down a road from a free society to the gulag. In this paper, we counter the claim that The Road to Serfdom...

The ‘societal crisis of the present' (Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart) is defined by the German neoliberals Eucken, Röpke and Rüstow as a state of ‘massification' (Vermassung), proletarianization and disintegration – accompanied by a far-reaching moral decadence, an ethical nihilism...

F. A. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944, so 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the event. The paper traces how Hayek came to write the book, who his opponents were, and how the book got interpreted by both friends and critics after its publication. Because the book is more typically...

F. A. Hayek took two trips to Chile, the first in 1977, the second in 1981. The visits were controversial. On the first trip he met with Genera l Augusto Pinochet, who had led a coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. During his 1981 visit, Hayek gave interviews that were published in the...

In The Darwin Economy a distinguished behavioral economist, Robert Frank, promises to put Adam Smith's “invisible hand narrative” into “context”. Neglecting history, empirical evidence, original sources, and a voluminous secondary literature, he fails to deliver. Frank predicts that one...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans — social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology.We share with the 18th century Scots...

Recent literature on Adam Smith and other 18th Scottish thinkers shows an engaged conversation between the Scots and today's scholars in the sciences that deal with humans - social sciences, humanities, as well as neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. We share with the 18th century Scots...

In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F.A. Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...

Many contemporary economists portray Smith's quot;perfect libertyquot; as a precursor of perfect competition. However, modern perfect competition, particularly post World War II mathematical general equilibrium models, are far removed from meaning and intent of Smith's quot;natural system of...