The present study raises the following questions: To what extent is axiomatic general equilibrium analysis a rational reconstruction of Scottish Political Economy as defined by the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith? How much is gained and how much lost by the axiomatic transformation of the...

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...

In this essay I consider the relationship between wealth and happiness in Adam Smith by a close reading of a famous section of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS IV.i.8-10). I interpret Smith as presenting an open-ended dialectic between the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of happiness with...

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...

James Ahiakpor's critique of our 2002 work on the relationship between a certain 1932 Harvard Memorandum on anti-depression policies and the 1932 Harris Foundation Manifesto dealing with the same issues misses the significance of these documents, and of the relationships between them, both for...

J. Viner, as well as all other economists who have written on Keynes's analysis of the rate of interest in the General Theory, erred in not taking into account Keynes's detailed, painstaking analysis on pp.180-182 of the General Theory, where Keynes clearly and carefully derived and identified...

The manner in which R. Kahn presented his mathematical results on the multiplier in the Economic Journal of June, 1931, is identical to the style of presenting mathematical results used by Keynes to present his mathematical analysis starting with the A Treatise on Probability in 1921. Keynes's...

Hicks's 1937 interpretation of Keynes's 1936 General Theory IS-LP(LM) model, which was analyzed in (r,Y) space by Keynes, in which Hicks used his IS-LL model in (Y,r) space, where we use Keynes's Y for income and not Hicks's I for income, supposedly generated much more interest and following...

It is ‘…quite puzzling,indeed'(Skidelsky,1992p.71) how a paper as extremely poor and deficient as R. B. Braithwaite's editorial foreword could have been selected to appear at the beginning of the 1973 Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Volume 8, version of the A Treatise on...