The socialist calculation debate occurred simultaneously with the development of increasingly idealized neoclassical market models in the early decades of the 20th century. Nonetheless, free market neoclassical economists were conspicuously absent from that debate, leaving the pro-market case to...

This paper is a revised version of a discussion with Nobel laureate Vernon Smith on the limits of neoclassical theory and on the opportunity to recover the alternative approach of classical economists and Marx. Vernon Smith is certainly right to insist on the heuristic force of the classical...

Political economists, both mainstream and Marxist, find it difficult to reconcile the «real» and «financial» appearances of capital. The conventional view is that «real» capital is an objective productive entity; that «finance» merely reflects this reality; and that, unfortunately, the...

In comparing Neoclassical economics with Austrian economics it is important to recognize first and foremost that Austrian economics is historically a school within the broader tradition of neoclassical economics. Austrian economics, unlike Institutionalism or Marxism or Post-Keynesianism, is not...

This paper analyses how Cournot's views on Monopoly have influenced the marginalists authors. It is argued that there are two different points of view in the cournotian evaluation of the consequence of Monopoly. The first one is a purely theoretical construction adopted in modern economic...

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 economic...

This paper looks at the contribution made by pre-1870 writers in economics (proto-neoclassicals) to what would later become known as the neoclassical theory of the firm. In particular we briefly consider the work of Dionysius Lardner, Johann von Thünen, John Stuart Mill, Charles Ellet, Jr. and...

This paper completes my previous paper "A Revision of the Theory of Perfect Competition and of Value" with a more global analysis of the mathematical mistakes of the neoclassical theory. During the second half of the twentieth century Microeconomic theory moved increasingly away from price...

In 2008 the global financial system suffered a catastrophic collapse. The question ‘why did it happen?' has rightly been foremost in the minds of many writers since but this paper seeks to approach the problem from a different angle. The dominant paradigm in economics was, and amazingly still...

This paper discusses Lawson's use of Veblen's concept of ‘neoclassical economics' and argument that the category of neoclassical economics should be jettisoned on the grounds that it obfuscates effective critique of mainstream economics. The paper links Lawson's critique of closed systems and...