'Methodological individualism' (MI) is often invoked as a fundamental description of the methodology both of neoclassical and Austrian economics, as well as other approaches, from New Keynesianism to analytical Marxism. Yet there is considerable controversy as to what the phrase means. Moreover,...

Following Mises’s foundational paper, ‘Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth’, first published in 1920, writers in the Austrian tradition have argued that socialism is impossible, because under socialism there would be no private property in the means of production, and...

Some economists in the Austrian tradition interpret the Arrow Impossibility Theorem (AIT) as support for their laissez-faire standpoint. They presume that the AIT cannot be applied in market settings, but in the context of voting, it adds weight to their arguments against the possibility of...

To understand the work of economic theorists it is often helpful to situate it in the context of the rhetorical strategy they were pursuing. Two ontologically distinct rhetorical strategies of laissez-faire may be distinguished by the way they articulate the individual interest with the general...

Bruce Caldwell (2004) “Hayek’s Challenge” tells the story of the evolution of Hayek’s methodological standpoint. In Caldwell’s account, Hayek is driven by the desire to identify a truly scientific approach to the study of society as a complex adaptive order which at the same time will...

Giocoli (2003) won awards from ESHET and, in its original form as Giocoli’s PhD thesis, from HES. It lives up to its promise. According to Giocoli, in the period between the 1890s and the 1980s a transformation took place in the way that economists thought about what it was that they were...

This Editorial introduces the special issue of IREE on pluralism in economics education. It draws out the pedagogical consequences of the contradiction between the plurality of the discipline and the singularity of student induction into it. Economics education should instead be based on...