This book profiles the lives and ideas of some of the leading thinkers on individual liberty - from ancient times to the present day - and sheds light on the key elements of liberal thought and those who shaped it across the centuries. The book identifies their common goals, but also highlights...

Jim Buchanan kept pictures of Knut Wicksell and Frank H. Knight on his office wall. Yet a careful look at Buchanan's work indicates that it ran counter to that of Frank H. Knight. Knight and Buchanan disagreed on the methodological, economic, ethical, and political assumptions that drove their...

Gavin Kennedy has carefully shown that the “Invisible Hand” myth, that greedy and selfish private optimizing behavior leads to a social macro optimum that benefits all, had nothing to do with Adam Smith's use of the invisible hand metaphor in The Wealth of Nations. Kennedy also showed that...

In a Table(Table 6.1-Keynes-J .Robinson correspondence ) contained at the back of a 2005 article by Marcuzzo and Sardoni,it is clear that someone had deliberately removed seven of the twelve letters of correspondence between J M Keynes(JMK) and Joan Violet Robinson(JVR) from September,8th...

The myth, that R. Kahn developed the mathematical and logical theory of the multiplier and then taught J M Keynes about the technical and mathematical properties of the multiplier concept is a myth deeply inbedded in the economics profession.It then leads to another myth that without Kahn’s...

Dennis Robertson had no understanding of how J M Keynes's Multiplier concept was based on the use of differential calculus techniques that required one to take the mathematical limit of an infinite, decreasing, geometric series. Robertson failed to see that the derivative concept requires that...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but also to...