This paper compares Deirdre McCloskey's reading of the "bourgeois reevaluation" with Sergio Ricossa's. Italian economist Sergio Ricossa was – like McCloskey – schooled in the neoclassical, formalistic tradition, but in time drifted toward a more "Austrian" approach, as he was influenced by...

Carl Menger's Principles of Economics is one of the pillars of modern economics. It was neither ignored nor disregarded at the time of its publication, as some narratives suggest. Commentaries in journals and newspapers show a broad and auspicious reception, in no way an indifferent one. This...

This paper analyzes the strategic role played by British classical political economy in constructing new technologies of power. Michel Foucault drew attention to a change that political economists promoted concerning the role of the state, which has been overlooked by historians of economic...

The paper deals with the continuities and discontinuities between some classical, Austrian and neo-Austrian authors with regard first to the theory of capital and then to the theory of entrepreneurship. Part I focuses on the elements of continuity between the classical and the Austrian theory of...

The historical development of bank liquidity doctrines is surveyed from the real bills doctrine and its antecedents to the present day. The underlying ideas of the succession of several dominant liquidity doctrines are analysed and compared, with attention to their historical contexts and...

Deirdre McCloskey's work on bourgeois virtues is pathbreaking, but it has relatively little to say about working class virtues. The present paper turns to John Stuart Mill (a McCloskey favorite) for his take on the "future of the laboring classes" (Mill [1848] 1965, 758 – 796). If modern...

Global trade determines how we live. Technology determines the extent of the market and the ease of trade. The transportation revolution reduced costs and cut travel times. The communication revolution (ICT) improved the quality and quantity of information in the global market and cut the cost...

The causal structure of capitalistic commodity production can be revealed by notionally separating total output into two categories: 'necessaries' bought by employees, and the rest constituting society's surplus. The rate of profit is determined in the wage good industry and becomes the system?s...

Helmedag (2012) derives effects on employment caused by changes in (a) uncompensated wage hours, (b) output, (c) productivity, and (d) a combination of the latter two. His results are derived from a linear two-sector model. His closure of the model is based on the determination of the profit...