In the analysis of 'justice' in market exchanges, the scholastic doctors made some contributions to the theories of prices and money. But probably the most important (and neglected) contribution lies in the domain of anthropology, i.e. in the explanation of human nature and human behaviour. In...

The paper argues that economics is not a perfect selection mechanism that preserves each and every economic idea that is valid and useful and jettisons all ideas that are not. The teleological view of the subject cannot be sustained. Therefore the task of the history of economic thought cannot...

Few eighteenth century practitioners of political economy have been as misunderstood or stereotyped as Benjamin Franklin. His economic essays which spanned a sixty-one year period (1729-1790), still create disagreement among scholars even on the doctrinal origins of Franklin's economic ideas. If...

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 paper develops a classification scheme of the many different definitions of elasticities of substitution and complementarity in the production case based on duality, gross and net substitution, elasticity type, and four different basic concepts of substitution and complementarity is...

In the 19th and 20th centuries economists of the German and Swedish language areas strongly influenced each other and made significant contributions to the development and critique of neoclassical economics. In our paper, we focus on the prominent contributions of Wicksell, Cassel, Hayek and...

In this paper we propose a broad survey of the main trends in the history of economic thought relative to education and human capital and try to assess whether progress has been made or not. If the main intuitions regarding the link between education and the economy were already present at the...

After Smith’s statement of the market virtues the process of gestation of economic policy as a consistent set of rules for public agenda has been rather slow. Until not so long ago economic policy as a discipline was confined to prescribing practical rules intended to explain technical...