How effective institutions come about and how they change are fundamental questions for economics and social science more generally. We show that these questions were central in the deliberations of lawyers in 17th century England, a critical historical juncture that has motivated important...

I outline the development of economic and political thought in Mexico, with an emphasis on the fortunes of liberalism. Since its independence in 1821 Mexico struggled to establish background conditions — a national identity, a stable polity, a broad cultural allegiance to liberal principles,...

The aim of this paper is to explain what philosophical commitments drove mainstream professional economists to understand their own discipline as leaving no space for ethics (including virtue) between, say, 1887 and 1971. In particular, it is argued that economics embraced a technocratic...

In this essay it is argued 1) that Ludwig von Mises's conception of thymology refers to the content of mental actions, and 2) that by Mises's own theory, standard economic propositions are not a priori propositions

This paper compares and contrasts the hermeneutic turn advocated by Don Lavoie in this 1985 essay on The Interpretive Dimension of Economics with the ontological turn that was gathering momentum amongst other groups of heterodox economists at about the same time. It is argued that an explicit...

Recently, economics, both as a science and as a profession, has fallen under scrutiny by authors from various fields. A common theme in the critical literature is the idea that economics has morally lost its way and must be reformed. Each of the books discussed in this review studies perceived...

The paper analyses Adam Smith's labour commanded value theory and proceeds with a comparison between this theory and Keynes' wage units approach, demonstrating that both authors were mainly concerned with a nominal anchor to the measure of value. This similarity in both theories is observed in...

Accuracy of economic theories and efficiency of economic policy strictly depend on the choice of the economic variables and processes mostly liable for description of economic reality. That states the general problem of assessment of any possible economic variables and processes chargeable for...