Economists have occasionally noticed the appearance of economists in cartoons produced for public amusement during crises. Yet the message behind such images has been less than fully appreciated. This paper provides evidence of such inattention in the context of the eighteenth century...

Montchrétien was definitely mercantilist. He praises the ancients, their honors and their self-discipline, but notes, like Serra, that there was no concept of Political Economy in Antiquity. The words, however, appear for the first time in the pseudoaristotelian Oeconomica II, where the...

The bulk of James Buchanan's contributions to political economy occupy 20 volumes in Liberty Fund's collection of his works. Reading those works shows both that Buchanan injected new strands of thought into that tradition and that his oeuvre contains points of apparent incoherence. To speak of a...

In recent years the term behavioral economics has arisen in consequence of the growing effort of a significant set of economists to import psychological methods and findings into economics. This body of work issues strong challenges to the use economists have made of rationality in economics....

Recently, economics, both as a science and as a profession, has fallen under scrutiny by authors from various fields. A common theme in the critical literature is the idea that economics has morally lost its way and must be reformed. Each of the books discussed in this review studies perceived...

Este artículo hace una lectura crítica de las principales interpretaciones modernas de los escritos económicos de Aristóteles. Primero revisa el debate entre las corrientes “primitivista” y “modernista”, encabezado por Rodbertus, Bücher y Meyer. Luego presenta y comenta los puntos...

In this paper, I challenge Murray Rothbard's interpretation of the School of Salamanca as proto-Austrian. I argue that Scholasticism is in goals and methods profoundly different from any modern school of economics, and that it is mistaken to use the Austrian school as a standard against which...

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...

Legal scholars and economists alike have been quite critical of F. A. Hayek’s legal theory. According to Richard Posner, Hayek’s legal theory is “formalist” and serves as a useless guide for legal scholars and judges. Alan Ebenstein claims that Hayek’s arguments in technical economics...

The Sensory Order (1952) is a work on theoretical psychology, which can be understood as an attempt to explain the relationship between cosmos and mind. By addressing these matters, Hayek established solid basis for his own ideas about economic knowledge and the problem to be solved by...