The role of first principles in economics is examined through the lens of dominant methodological approaches of the classical and neoclassical periods. First principles are most clearly displayed in pure deductive systems. The tension between first principles as the basis for deductivist...

No other phrase has been as widely and as controversially used in the discussion of capitalism and markets as the ‘invisible hand', a metaphor that Adam Smith used just once in each of his major works. There has been a debate as to whether Smith himself attached any importance to this...

The model of Homo economicus has often been criticized as unrealistic. In particular, it has been found lacking for allegedly assuming that people are selfish, an assumption which is contradicted by both introspection and empirical evidence. The aim of this paper is to show that never in the...

Standard economic models are based on axioms that epitomize the fundamental behavioral assumptions. This approach is trapped in a blind alley. The suggested change of perspective is guided by the question: what is the minimum set of nonbehavioral propositions for the consistent reconstruction of...

Henry George and the Austrians disagreed on whether land is inherently different from other factors. Beyond this, they had much in common. The paper specifically argues that the similarities between George and the Austrians are derived from a similar underlying approach to choice. Both relied on...

The fields of the history and methodology of economics have recently experienced a quantitative turn. Among the quantitative tools and methods recently used, text mining has received less attention. In this article, we apply a “text as data” approach to the study of Adam Smith's The Wealth...

Adam Smith hat in seinem Bild des Menschen der Rolle der Imagination einen so großen Stellenwert eingeräumt, dass es berechtigt ist, ihn als Bildanthropologen zu bezeichnen. Der Aspekt des Bildvermögens von Menschen geriet im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Geschichte der Wirtschaftstheorie...

In their recent book Where Economics Went Wrong, David Colander and Craig Freedman (2018) argue that economics went wrong when it abandoned the Classical liberal firewall that demanded separation of scientific theory from the art of policy making. Colander has long advanced the idea that applied...

Economic modeling struggles often with a lack of realism. The reason for that is that economic theory for the last 100 years has focused on simplifying assumptions which reduced important aspects of the economic reality. Concentrating on fix-point solutions and external statistical shocks...

Once economics came to be understood as the scientific investigation of the operation of markets, economic theorists pushed ethical and metaphysical concerns outside their realm of study. After the separation, the claims of Christian theology had no more jurisdiction over the discipline of...