Robert Malthus was, by his own admission, opposed to slavery and the slave trade. Nevertheless, English proponents of the slave trade, and southern slave owners in the southern United States, appealed to his population principle in their defense. The disconnect between these two statements is a...

Two stories currently circulate regarding Frank Knight's relationship to the Chicago School of Economics. The first is a story of tradition, emphasizing the continuity of Chicago economics; the other emphasizes the new beginnings in the post-war period. The second story even implies that the...

Two central figures of the defense of classical liberalism against the onslaught of socialism in the mid-twentieth century were F.A. Hayek and Frank H. Knight. Despite their shared purpose and intellectual common ground, Knight criticized Hayek's understanding of liberalism severely. The paper...

Frank H. Knight's antagonism to religion is well-known, and features prominently in his writings from the 1930s on. But during the 1920s, when he was a professor at the University of Iowa and wrote some of his most important essays on the limitations of economics, Knight was an active...

Risk, Uncertainty and Profit was published in 1921, but started as the doctoral thesis “A Theory of Business Profit,” defended in 1916. The first half of the paper examines the changes in organization and argument that Knight undertook between completing the thesis defense and the book’s...

We examine two related questions. First, whether the emerging literature on collaboration in creative communities provides any insights that might assist us in understanding the Chicago School of Economics. Secondly, whether the history of Chicago economics provides any insights that might...

One often hears the argument that Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments provides a basis for the construction of a morality independent of a religion based on revelation. Central to this argument is Smith’s impartial spectator, whose study of human motivation through observation of the...

The methodological debate between Frank Knight and Terence Hutchison is usually framed in terms of the philosophical debates between positivism and intuitionism, or between empirical knowledge and theoretical knowledge. Hutchison’s The significance and basic postulates of economic theory was,...

In a recent paper (Sharpening Tools in the Workshop, SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1014015), I argued that the Chicago School’s workshop model created an institutional context within which scientific collaboration among faculty and graduate students flourished. The benefit of the workshop...

The social sciences at the University of Chicago are renowned for their leadership in the development of empirical investigation in their respective disciplines. The post-war Chicago School of economics is only the best known of the efforts at the University to entrench specialized competencies...