Neoclassical economists of the current era frequently pay lip service to Adam Smith’s theories to certify the validity of natural-laws-based, laissez-faire policies. However, neoclassical theories are fundamentally disconnected from Adam Smith’s notion of value, his understanding of the...

Mainstream economics has been running the gauntlet of adverse criticism for decades. These critiques claim as a message of central importance that mainstream economics has lost its relevance as for understanding reality. By making a brief comparison between the methodological strategies of the...

For non-economists, it is often difficult to understand why economists place so much emphasis on the self-interest motive. It is obvious that people act out of a variety of motives - gratitude, anger, social obligation and many, many other motives. There are several reasons why economists still...

Die moderne Volkswirtschaftslehre als wissenschaftliche Disziplin ist einerseits durch große Uneinheitlichkeit geprägt, die andererseits selbst in Zeiten der Krise der Theorie anscheinend nicht nachhaltig in ein öffentliches Bewusstsein vordringen konnte. Nach wie vor wird "die Ökonomik"...

The economic works of Johann Heinrich von Thünen include 1,000 unpublished pages of drafts and notes on the basis of which he prepared the second volume of his famous “Isolated State in Relation to Agriculture and Political Economy”. Thünen wrote his texts in the so-called Deutsche...

Die Begriffe Wohlfahrt und Wohlstand werden in ihrem dogmenhistorischen Entstehungskontext untersucht. Dabei wird zum einen der Schwerpunkt auf die von den Physiokraten, aber auch von John Stuart Mill, W. Stanley Jevons und sogar von deutschen Ordoliberalen thematisierten Wachstumsgrenzen gelegt...

The historical forerunners of contemporary austerity are still largely unexplored. This essay considers the "liberal phase" of Fascist Italy (1922-1925) as a case study to explain austerity as a full-blown rationality, that is intrinsically, and simultaneously, theory and practice, encompassing...