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...

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...

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...

In their recent book Where Economics Went Wrong, David Colander and Craig Freedman (2018) argue that economics went wrong when it abandoned the Classical liberal firewall that demanded separation of scientific theory from the art of policy making. Colander has long advanced the idea that applied...

This is a preliminary draft of the first of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explores some issues regarding the scholarly location of what is often described as the Virginia...

The neoclassical synthesis has been defined as a bridge between Keynesian theory and Walrasian general equilibrium theory. The aim of this article is to show that founders of the neoclassical synthesis were not homogenous in their appraisal of the importance of Walrasian theory. To do so, we...

In this introduction sketch the architecture of Mises' economics and political economy. Mises' overarching program is one of examining exchange (economic science) and the institutions within which exchange takes place (political economy). In recent years the economics profession has moved...

The purpose of this chapter is to link Ronald Coase's methodological approach to what he ‘learned' when he was at the London School of Economics (LSE) from Edwin Cannan and Arnold Plant. The main lesson Coase taught us and insisted upon was that economics should not be too ‘abstract' and...

Our focus in this chapter will be on the methodological role that Stigler played in validating what he regarded as the science of economics that he had inherited from his own teacher, Frank Knight, and how this affected his understanding not only of economic theory but also public policy....