The article discusses the contribution by Aldo Montesano in this number, with a special focus on the definitions of economics and of political economy. In trying to answer if economics is a moral discipline and if it is a science, the article highlights that different schools of economists have...

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...

The aim of this paper is to explain what philosophical commitments drove mainstream professional economists to understand their own discipline as leaving no space for ethics (including virtue) between, say, 1887 and 1971. In particular, it is argued that economics embraced a technocratic...

In the field of business ethics, Adam Smith has generally been viewed with a measure of suspicion. Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand - according to which self-interest promotes the greater good - has generally been seen as a fundamental challenge to a discipline committed to the...

Founded fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society served in its early years to support scholarship and teaching in the history of economic thought. But the decades long removal of history from economics departments and graduate programs has made the Society's mission increasingly...

I argue that economists have reasons internal to the way that evidence works in the sciences to re-discover the importance of the history of their own discipline. For it is a constitutive element of science - here conceived as an ongoing research practice (as opposed to as an explanatory...

This article--designed to give readers unfamiliar with public choice a historical overview and flavor for the kinds of problems considered--is divided into three main sections, "historical origins," the "modern founders of MPE," and a brief description of some "current issues" studied by public...

There are hundreds and thousands of schools of thought in social science and humanities, while there is only one school of thought in natural science. This paper investigates the question how to unify all schools of thought in social science and humanities into one scientific school of thought...

Founded fifty years ago, the History of Economics Society served in its early years to support scholarship and teaching in the history of economic thought. But the decades long removal of history from economics departments and graduate programs has made the Society’s mission increasingly...

What determines the kinds of questions economists ask and the answers they find convincing? More generally, why are the institutions that constitute scholarly economics the way they are? I answer both of these questions by positing that within the modern economics profession, it is plausible...