Recently, economists have re-discovered the fact of the cultural embeddedness of institutions. This raises the question whether there are transcultural universals of institutions and institutional design. The paper proposes that such universals cannot possibly be empirical givens, but have to be...

The late Warren J. Samuels saw intellectual history as an integral part of his economic scholarship. As an intellectual history he sought to elucidate a past economist's general theory of economic policy in order to assess the relevance of that policy approach to contemporary settings. For...

There is a striking contrast between the significance of Harold Hotelling’s contribution to industrial economics and the fact that his location model was invalid, unrealistic and non-robust. It is difficult to make sense of the explanatory value of Hotelling’s model based on philosophical...

The method appropriate to the historical and conceptual investigation of Hayek’s ideas is implicit in his own writings on the methodology of disciplines that study complex phenomena. The phenomena of Hayek’s career are complex phenomena requiring a method appropriate to this complexity.

Based on the ontological and epistemological problems and solutions exposed in the previous paper, we scrutinize the philosophical grounds of three main schools of economics. They are not opposing one another as solid blocks of incompatible ideas and theories, but each school contains...

This note presents new archival evidence about John Maynard Keynes’ attitudes toward Jews. The relevant material is composed of two letters sent by Robert G. Wertheimer to Bertrand Russell and Richard F. Kahn along with their replies. Between 1963 and 1964, Wertheimer – an Austrian-born...

Luigi Bodio (1840-1920) was an Italian economist and statistician, considered one of the founders of the Italian Statistics. He was one of the 21 founding members of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1885, ISI Director-General during the first 20 years (1885-1905) and ISI...

This paper seeks to report and analyse the economic thought of Ibn al-Qayyim, a great thinker of Islam. He discussed mainly the problems of price control, market mechanism, supervision of economic activities (al-hisbah), riches and poverty, interest and zakah, at different places in his numerous...

The present paper studies economic ideas of an Azharite graduate of the nineteenth century Egypt - Rifā‘ah Rāfi‘ al-Tahtāwī who was influenced by the French Scholars and Philosophers, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mantesquieu. He wrote on significance of industry, productive and unproductive...

Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, a nineteenth century Tunisian scholar and statesman, thought and worked for her politico-economic strengthening and uplift of Tunisia. He was much impressed by the political system of the West and endeavored to create similar political institutions in his own country. In...