This brief essay sketches the ways in which four leading economic thinkers (Knight, Coase, Posner and Sunstein) have dealt with a vexing tension in the relations of economics to law, the state, and the social. The tension arises as microeconomists address (or fail to address) the relations of...

This paper analyzes the strategic role played by British classical political economy in constructing new technologies of power. Michel Foucault drew attention to a change that political economists promoted concerning the role of the state, which has been overlooked by historians of economic...

An evolutionary perspective on economic behavior has to account for the influences that the human genetic endowment has on the choices the agents make. Likely to have been fixed in times of fierce selection pressure, this endowment is presumably adapted to the living conditions of early humans....

The recent debate about the value of Darwinism as a source of ontological foundations for evolutionary economics reduces to a disagreement about whether or not the causal logic of Darwinism applies to economic evolution. However, this logic has not yet been fully specified. While the explanantia...

Neuroeconomics rightly has been claimed to be a natural extension of bioeconomics. One of the things bioeconomics investigates is what behavioral dispositions and what behavioral patterns evolutionary processes have produced. Neuroeconomics extends this to the study of evolved mechanisms that...

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith uses the noun superior in multiple ways. A comparative superior is one who is superior in a specific quality or characteristic; the rules of (commutative) justice apply equally to the comparative superior and the comparative inferior. But Smith identifies...

This paper offers a reinterpretation of quot;Adam Smith's problemquot; and reconsiders the relation between ethics and economics. It makes a critical revision of the attempts that seek to solve this problem, proposes an alternative framework constructed on the Smithian concepts of sympathy and...

In Smith there is something of a contrariety, or double doctrine, on justice: Much of his writing leaves us with the impression that we should use justice and its cognates to mean commutative justice, and only that. But much also authorizes the conclusion that we should embrace and talk of three...

This paper discusses how in the British tradition, political economy, which partly emerged out of discourses in natural theology, ethics, and jurisprudence, casts some light on the content of our moral obligations. Drawing on Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, I illustrate how commerce came to be...