The article investigates Wicksell's change of mind about the machinery question between 1890 and 1900/1901. Wicksell at first sided with the so-called “compensation theory” that workers are not harmed by the introduction of machinery. In his lecture notes of April 1900, made available here...

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...

Current efforts of reconciling economics with ethics, as exemplified by the works of Amartya Sen, may be assisted by a glance back into the history of ideas. A tradition typically overlooked in Anglo-American scholarship, the Spanish and Latin America movement of krausismo, proposed a conception...

The capability approach has been made operable and an example is the Human Development Index and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (Dotter & Klasen, 2014). However, its operable nature in the field of evaluation of specific dimension such as education, gender and poverty from a diffuse...

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...