This article is the introductory chapter to a festschrift in honour of Geoff Hodgson. In work spanning four decades, Geoff Hodgson has made many path-breaking contributions to institutional economics, evolutionary economics, economic methodology, the history of economic thought and social theory...

I count it a great privilege to contribute an essay to the volume for John Henry. I have known him since he was a doctoral student at McGill in the 1970s. John was supervised by my old and dear friend, the late Athanasios (Tom) Asimakopulos. (Tom and I were Ph.D students at King's, Cambridge in...

Italian Abstract: L'articolo persegue un duplice obiettivo: 1) far luce su un aspetto ignoto del pensiero einaudiano: l'esistenza di un paradigma 'narrative' dell'imprenditore; 2) mostrare come e perché tale paradigma: a) è da ricondursi nell'alveo della più ampia riflessione di Einaudi sul...

Recently, economists have re-discovered the fact of the cultural embeddedness of institutions. This raises the question whether there are transcultural universals of institutions and institutional design. The paper proposes that such universals cannot possibly be empirical givens, but have to be...

The late Warren J. Samuels saw intellectual history as an integral part of his economic scholarship. As an intellectual history he sought to elucidate a past economist's general theory of economic policy in order to assess the relevance of that policy approach to contemporary settings. For...

There is a striking contrast between the significance of Harold Hotelling’s contribution to industrial economics and the fact that his location model was invalid, unrealistic and non-robust. It is difficult to make sense of the explanatory value of Hotelling’s model based on philosophical...

The method appropriate to the historical and conceptual investigation of Hayek’s ideas is implicit in his own writings on the methodology of disciplines that study complex phenomena. The phenomena of Hayek’s career are complex phenomena requiring a method appropriate to this complexity.

Based on the ontological and epistemological problems and solutions exposed in the previous paper, we scrutinize the philosophical grounds of three main schools of economics. They are not opposing one another as solid blocks of incompatible ideas and theories, but each school contains...

This note presents new archival evidence about John Maynard Keynes’ attitudes toward Jews. The relevant material is composed of two letters sent by Robert G. Wertheimer to Bertrand Russell and Richard F. Kahn along with their replies. Between 1963 and 1964, Wertheimer – an Austrian-born...

Luigi Bodio (1840-1920) was an Italian economist and statistician, considered one of the founders of the Italian Statistics. He was one of the 21 founding members of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1885, ISI Director-General during the first 20 years (1885-1905) and ISI...