James M. Buchanan revisited his mentor's famous 1923 essay “The Ethics of Competition” in an essay written for the centenary celebration of Frank Knight's birth in 1985. Buchanan's paper focused on the first section of Knight's essay, and outlined why it provided an inadequate criticism of a...

A review of Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America that focuses on the implications of her historiographic method in reading Jim Buchanan's work, and the resulting failure to take seriously the underlying framework of constitutional...

Volume 39C of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, features a symposium marking the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frank H. Knight's Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit. The symposium features contributions from Per Bylund, Richard E. Wagner, our own Carlos Eduardo...

The libertarian defense of free enterprise, free trade, and freedom from government regulations and controls is grounded in a normative commitment to individual freedom. The majority of the economics profession, including the Chicago School, are committed in the first instance to methodological...

T. Robert Malthus is usually remembered for the “gloomy presentiments” of the population principle articulated in the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population. Less attention is given to the subsequent editions of the Essay, in which Malthus refined the principle, and...

Frank Knight's early life, including his family history, brothers in economics, early education, education at American University (Harriman, TN) and Milligan College, experience at the Jamestown Exposition, graduate study at Tennessee and Cornell. Clarifies his religious background, educational...

This draft chapter for the Elgar International Handbook on Teaching and Learning Economics is intended to give advice to instructors who might be teaching a history of economic thought course to undergraduates for the first time or who have perhaps been teaching for a while but would like to...

Economics today is a model building and testing science. But scientific economics was not always understood in terms of models. Economics first emerged as a separate field of scientific study in post-bellum America. The laissez-faire orientation of early American moral philosophy gave way to...

The last two chapters of Frank H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty and Profit are seldom cited and frequently ignored. But in those chapters, Knight moves from entrepreneurial judgment and organizational strategies to meet the challenges uncertainty presents at the firm level to the wider question...