Adam Smith completely rejected Utilitarianism in any form in his lifetime in his two major books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). This paper will examine the basis for Smith’s rejection of Utilitarianism in the Wealth of Nations (1776) only. The Virtue...

Adam Smith’s version of Virtue Ethics can be traced directly back to Plato (Socrates) and Aristotle. Smith basically skipped Aquinas and Augustine because they were also Catholic theologians, as well as philosophers. Referencing them would not have been looked upon kindly by the Scottish...

In this paper, we show that Adam Smith pointed out the existence of the Feldstein-Horioka Paradox or Puzzle and even gave an explanation for it more than 200 years before the publication of Feldstein and Horioka (1980). Smith argues that it is the pursuit of their own security that leads owners...

Most of the current critical views on American antitrust law focus on a supposed misinterpretation by modern, welfare-driven antitrust enforcers of the true meaning of the competition principle. The paper contributes to the debate by reconstructing the principle’s historical origin. While it...

This paper is a revised version of a discussion with Nobel laureate Vernon Smith on the limits of neoclassical theory and on the opportunity to recover the alternative approach of classical economists and Marx. Vernon Smith is certainly right to insist on the heuristic force of the classical...

Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach...

There are several ways to incorporate evolutionary concepts into economic thinking. This article reviews the most important transfers of this kind into evolutionary economics. It broadly differentiates between approaches that draw on an analogy construction to the biological sphere, those that...

It has been suggested that, by generalizing Darwinian principles, a common foundation can be derived for all scientific disciplines dealing with evolutionary processes, especially for evolutionary economics. In this paper we show, however, that the principles of such a "Generalized Darwinism"...

The aim of this article is to link Veblen's work on evolutionary economics to recently developed evolutionary game theory (EGT). This represents the first step towards incorporating Veblen's socio-economic evolution theory into discussion concerning applying EGT to social environments. An...

Institutional and evolutionary economists have recognized that organizations are social as well as economic entities, but in modern evolutionary theories of the firm the social aspect of economic organization is typically lost. This is a result of the fact that these theories take the existence...