Dieser Aufsatz reflektiert das Verständnis von Mensch und Natur, welches dem Denken von Malthus zugrunde liegt und kontrastiert es mit dem völlig anderen Verständnis seines Zeitgenossen William Wordsworth. Wir zeigen, dass die ökonomischen Überlegungen beider entscheidend durch diese...

In the field of business ethics, Adam Smith has generally been viewed with a measure of suspicion. Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand - according to which self-interest promotes the greater good - has generally been seen as a fundamental challenge to a discipline committed to the...

In this paper the view of humankind and nature upon which the thinking of Malthus is founded will be reflected on and contrasted with the opposed understanding of his contemporary Wordsworth. We show that the economic considerations of both are based decidedly on the premise of these views, and...

The method appropriate to the historical and conceptual investigation of Hayek’s ideas is implicit in his own writings on the methodology of disciplines that study complex phenomena. The phenomena of Hayek’s career are complex phenomena requiring a method appropriate to this complexity.

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...

Ronald Coase (1910-2013), who sadly died at the remarkable age of 102, made significant contributions to economics based on common sense and the detailed study of his topics. Coase was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991 “for his discovery and clarification of the significance...

This paper focuses on Ludwig von Mises methodological apriorism. It uses Wittgenstein’s private language argument as the basis for a critique of Mises’s claim to have found apodictically certain foundations for economic analysis. It is argued instead that Mises’s methodology is more...

The aim of this paper is to explain what philosophical commitments drove mainstream professional economists to understand their own discipline as leaving no space for ethics (including virtue) between, say, 1887 and 1971. In particular, it is argued that economics embraced a technocratic...

In Appreciation and Interest Irving Fisher (1896) derived an equation connecting interest rates in any two standards of value. The original Fisher equation (OFE) was expressed in terms of the expected appreciation of money [percent change in E(1/P)] whereas the ubiquitous conventional Fisher...

This is the first of two essays on the influences of Peter Drucker’s exposure to proponents of the Austrian School of economics on his writing and philosophical views. In this essay, I review the major influences that appear to have shaped much of his thinking, focusing mainly on post-World...