The term “Institutional Economics” has been applied to some of capitalism's strongest critics as well as its most ardent apologists. This paradox in terms has bred contradictory literature in development economics, some declaring the death of this line of thought while others herald its...

Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is an influential book more than seventy years after its publication. This paper examines his arguments and finds that they come up short in many ways and suggests that we have taken "another road to serfdom". Hayek's mind was completely closed to the...

Dieser Aufsatz reflektiert das Verständnis von Mensch und Natur, welches dem Denken von Malthus zugrunde liegt und kontrastiert es mit dem völlig anderen Verständnis seines Zeitgenossen William Wordsworth. Wir zeigen, dass die ökonomischen Überlegungen beider entscheidend durch diese...

Socioeconomic stability with receding international conflict is closer at hand due to two modern developments: (1) A general recognition and acceptance of the permanent nuclear détente between major powers, allowing international cooperation for the common good; and (2) The deepening of...

This text challenges assumptions about the foundations of the Leon Walras' marginalist theory in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. The problematic is approached through a comparative study between Bentham's and Walras' ideas on three focus areas: 1. their views of society and the social...

Following the development of knowledge economies, there has been a rapid expansion of economic analysis of knowledge, both in the context of technological knowledge in particular and the decision theory in general. This paper surveys this literature by identifying the main themes and...

The first edition of Mark's Economic Theory in Retrospect (1962) includes a chapter on methodology, ‘A Methodological Postscript,' which starts with four big epistemological and methodological questions: ‘What do economists know? How much does economics explain? What are the principles upon...

As history, institutions, social and political forces specific to any economy have a profound effect on that economy's dynamics, it is important to understand how these have evolved with the development of capitalism. The classical economists analysed economies with labour surpluses, which kept...

One way to evaluate whether the history of economics has moved toward the history of science is to compare recent work in both fields. In order to narrow the comparison in two rapidly expanding publication areas, I decided to examine two corresponding sets of literature in each field: the...

I argue that economists have reasons internal to the way that evidence works in the sciences to re-discover the importance of the history of their own discipline. For it is a constitutive element of science - here conceived as an ongoing research practice (as opposed to as an explanatory...