The purpose of this article is to analyse the way economists interested in social and economic evolution cite, mention or refer to Darwin. We focus on the attitude of economists towards Darwin's theory of social evolution - an issue he considered as central to his theory. We show that economists...

In a recent article, William Darity, M’Balou Camara, and Nancy MacLean (2023) argue that economist W.H. Hutt was a white supremacist. In the course of their analysis, Darity et al. refer to a claim Hutt made about “exclusive clubs”, that they link to James Buchanan’s article on clubs...

In this paper, we show that, in 1961 and before he had read "The Problem of Social Cost", Calabresi reached exactly the same conclusions as the one reached by Coase and summarized by Stigler as the "Coase theorem" but he believed that this result was valid only in the theoretical world of the...

The article provides an economic interpretation of Kelsen's theory of decentralized governments. It helps to distinguish different forms of federalism and in particular the corresponding conflicts of principalship inside the governmental structure. The model is applied to the early American...

In 1964, Buchanan wrote an article in which he criticized the definition of economics given by Robbins in his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. This article is remarkable because it represents Buchanan's attempts to redefine economics, that is, not only to propose his own...

pt. 1. From old to new law and economics -- pt. 2. Towards an economic analysis of law -- pt. 3. The economics of the emergence and establishment of norms and customs -- pt. 4. The economics of legal systems -- pt. 5. The economics of judicial decision making -- pt. 6. Efficiency of the common...

This paper discusses the thesis that in Arrow’s Possibility Theorem the dictator (merely) serves as a solution to the logical problem of aggregating preference while Machiavelli’s dictator, the Prince, has the historical function to bring order into a world of chaos and thus make society...

This article describes the intellectual trajectory James Buchanan followed from the early 1950s, when he started to work on ``spillover effects,'' to the mid-1960s, when he had completed a consistent explanation of the efficiency of market mechanisms and private arrangements in the presence of...