Adam Smith infused the expression “impartial spectator” with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which normally would aptly take the definite article the, and which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator of an...

On regular issues of policy reform—presupposing a stable integrated polity— Hume, Smith, and Burke were liberal in the original political meaning of “liberal.” Thus, on policy reform, although they accorded the status quo a certain presumption (as any reasonable person must), the more...

Prompted by Emily Chamlee-Wright’s fine essay “Self-censorship and Associational Life in the Liberal Academy” (the symposium lead essay), I present a scheme that focuses on something that might not seem to fit Emily’s focus on self-censorship. But after presenting my scheme I will...

In the first edition of the Wealth of Nations, published in London in 1776, the author-works list is presented in a very unusual place: directly opposite the table of contents. That placement suggests a continuity and unity in Adam Smith’s published works. A photograph provides a touchstone to...

Adam Smith included understanding and belonging among basic human needs. Humans have spiritual and material needs that they can satisfy through coordination and cooperation, both need communication. Religion and philosophy emerge when people communicate the explanations they have of their...

This paper examines Adam Smith’s vision of family life and the role of the family in society as it stems from the Theory of Moral Sentiments. We first discuss textual evidences of Smith’s vision of gender differences and of the relationships between the sexes. Then we turn to TMS’s...

The social encyclical Rerum Novarum closely links the question of poverty with that of property, and invokes Thomas Aquinas. But on closer examination, the reasoning developed in favour of property departs from the scholastic thinker, since it maintains more affinities with the liberal tradition...

The focus of evolutionary economics is a process of continuous economic and organizational change. Currently there is no agreement on the explanation of economic evolution. Rather there are competing interpretations. To achieve a common understanding of economic evolution, from the perspective...

The paper offers a proof that expected utility maximisation with logarithmic utility is a dominant preference in the biological selection process in the sense that a population following any other preference for decision-making under risk will, with a probability that approaches certainty,...

The purpose of this paper is to identify complementarities between the approaches of population ecology and evolutionary economics in order to contribute to a synthesis of organizational evolutionary dynamics and its implications for a strategic management research model. Using the...