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...

This paper looks at the influence (or lack of influence) that ideas to do with the division of labour have had on the mainstream economic theory of the firm. The notion of the division of labour goes back, at least, to ancient India, the ancient Greeks and the ancient Chinese but it took two...

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...

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...

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...

The chapter goes over the main stages in the development of Quesnay’s Tableau Économique. The traditional interpretation of this development as a fundamentally continuous process of clarification and elaboration is confirmed. By discussing the opposite view, however, a clearer picture of the...