From the early-1950s on, F.A. Hayek was concerned with the development of a methodology of sciences that study systems of complex phenomena. Hayek argued that the knowledge that can be acquired about such systems is, in virtue of their complexity (and the comparatively narrow boundaries of human...

The present paper considers the implications of the postulate that the activities of scientists constitute complex phenomena in the sense associated with the methodological writings of the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, methodologist, and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek. Although...

In this review of Tim Leonard's remarkable book Illiberal Reformers, Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, I argue that, having defined progressivism as a political epistemology of faith in the powers of policymaking, Leonard did not follow up several of the interesting...

This is the introduction a Symposium on Carl Menger on the Centenary of his Death. Our introduction includes a short biographical sketch of Carl Menger's life as well as a summary of the contribtuions to the symposium by Sandra J. Peart, Günther Chaloupek, Erwin Dekker, and Sandye Gloria

I examine the history of the concept of spontaneity in philosophy and the social sciences, particularly as it relates to monetary phenomena. I then offer an argument for the general significance of spontaneity. Scholars across the humanities and social sciences, whatever their (disciplinary,...

Epistemic burdens – the nature and extent of our ignorance (that and how) with respect to various courses of action – serve to determine our incentive structures. Courses of action that seem to bear impossibly heavy epistemic burdens are typically not counted as options in an actor’s menu,...

Economists associated with the Austrian School of Economics are known to deny the value of macroeconomics as descended from the work of John Maynard Keynes and, especially, his followers. Yet, Austrian economists regularly engage in a related scientific activity: theorizing about the causes and...

The paper argues for three points. The first purpose of the paper is to show that Carl Menger would have rejected Ludwig von Mises’ methodological apriorism. Second, I argue that Carl Menger was a pluralist about the methods of theoretical economics and that Mises was rather less of a...

Volume 41A of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology features a symposium on "Religion, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Rise of Liberalism," a new research essay by Syed Mohib Ali, and a roundtable on the institutionalist economics of Geoffrey Hodgson.

The centerpiece of Volume 40B of Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology is a symposium on the work of William Baumol, edited by Erwin Dekker. The symposium includes contributions from Alex Tabarrok, Jochen Hartwig and Hagen M. Krämer, Alexandre Chirat, Victor A. Beker,...