What was Adam Smith's intellectual laboratory? How did his economic theory take shape? Were his metaphors of order only residual and ornamental expressions? This book answers these questions by analyzing the formation of the concepts of market and social order in Adam Smith's work, by...

Tiziano Raffaelli (Pisa 1950) was a widely esteemed scholar in the field of the history and methodology of economics, who died suddenly in January 2016 while still in the midst of working and of developing projects for new lines of research. He was a philosopher of science by formation and a...

The thesis put forward in this paper is that Herbert A. Simon was a distinctive theoretician of decentralized decisional systems alternative to the market, from planning to organizations. This issue emerges from the convergence of four perspectives, each with a different role and influence on...

Chapter 1. Introduction -- Part 1. Machines, Bodies, and Invisible Hands -- Chapter 2. Metaphors as conceptual tools -- Chapter 3. The metaphor of the machine -- Chapter 4. Smith and the organic metaphors -- Chapter 5. The invisible hand -- Part 2. Visible and Invisible Orders: The Secrets of...