Liberalism was born as a utopia against monarchy and religion; it became the ideology of capitalism. This essay sets out that Marx's thought is above all a criticism of capitalism, and therefore it also represents the utopia corresponding to capitalism, described as a "communist" utopia, the...

Le libéralisme est né comme une utopie au sens de Ricœur. De ce fait, utopie de la monarchie absolue, il est devenu l'idéologie du capitalisme. La pensée de Marx est avant tout une critique du capitalisme dont l'essentiel du propos porte sur les rapports sociaux au sein du capitalisme. Son...

In the history of economic thought Walter Eucken is mostly known for his impact in establishing the Social Market Economy in post-war Germany. Even though there is a growing interest in his ideas especially from an Austrian and a Constitutional Economics perspective, his influence on the...

Where should we place Frank Knight in the passage from classical liberalism to neo-liberalism? The argument has recently been made by that Knight should be placed among the group of liberals of an “older generation” that neo-liberals generally, and the Chicago School in particular, separated...

In a recent article in "Challenge" magazine, Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail argue that the central message of F.A. Hayek's, "The Road to Serfdom" is that any attempt to create a welfare state must lead inevitably to totalitarianism. I argue in my paper that this was not the central argument;...

Our main contention is that two different re-conceptualizations of liberal democracy took place among Chicago economists in the postwar period. The first emerged out of Frank H. Knight's ruminations in the 1930s on the failures of liberalism. By the 1940s, Knight devoted most of his attention to...

In “The Soul of Classical Liberalism” (2000), James Buchanan argues that modern advocates of the liberal order must move beyond the mid-20th century project of “saving the books” and “saving the ideas” and instead embrace the challenge of “saving the soul” of liberalism. The...

In this paper, the author analyzes Friedman's dogmatic approach towards freedom (part 2), his misuse of historical examples (part 3), and his tautological definition of freedom (part 4). In fairness to Friedman, however, this paper concludes by explaining why any attempt to define freedom is...

This paper provides, after a contextualizing introduction, the first-time translation of Walter Eucken’s presentation during the first session of the founding meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, April 1-10, 1947. Eucken was the only scholar based in Germany to attend the conference and took...