Is everything good in political economy incorporated into modern economic theory? With the transition of the art of political economy into the science of economics, there was a significant synthesis of the graduate education curriculum. The prevailing technique in economics, a neoclassical...

What led to the fall of the Templars? Though the vast historiographical literature suggests that King Philip IV’s financial situation was the main reason for the downfall of the Templars, we contend that it had little to do with Philip IV per se. Rather the Templars were destroyed mostly due...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the intellectual influences on Meira Penna’s arguments on the origins of the Brazilian paternalistic state. As a classical liberal, Meira Penna’s political economy could easily be connected to different schools of thought such as the Chicago,...

Do interest groups lobby their friends or foes? The literature is divided when it comes to the main target of interest groups’ tactics. This paper uses a unique case study of Brazil’s National Constituent Assembly (ANC) in 1988 to contribute to this contentious literature. Inside the...

Is a monopolized banking sector a threat to democracy? While Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner (1944) recognized that socialism was a threat to democracy, they also held that a tendency towards banking sector monopolization under capitalism would undermine democracy through the inevitable...

Is capitalism a necessary condition for political freedom? Friedrich Hayek argued that capitalism is necessary for political freedom in what is now known as the Hayek-Friedman Hypothesis. While previous empirical work using economic freedom as a proxy for capitalism has somewhat confirmed the...