Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740 (Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson)
Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015).
Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2015).
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, clerics gave lectures at the University of Salamanca on such topics as the varying purchasing power of money, the morality of money, and how price is determined. While she was teaching at the London School of Economics, Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson was urged to investigate early records of these lectures. Her study of the manuscript notes of these then-obscure lectures led to her interest in the development of economic ideas in early Spain and their subsequent influence on the rest of Western Europe. The ideas of the Spanish scholastics influenced the work of Pufendorf, Locke, and Hutcheson, and the economic thinking of Condillac, Turgot, and Say. Grice-Hutchinson studied at the London School of Economics, where she received her Ph.D. on the monetary theory of the School of Salamanca under the supervision of F. A. Hayek.
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2013).
In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government begins by examining James Madison’s statement: “A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the object of government, which is the happiness of the people; secondly, a knowledge of the means by which that object can best be attained.” Murray exhibits a thoughtful, accessible writing style as he considers such basic, important questions as whether individual efforts or government reform should be responsible for dealing with society’s problems. Drawing from his minimalist-government viewpoint, Murray proposes that government not try to force happiness on the people with federal policies or programs but, rather, that it provide conditions that enable people to pursue happiness on their own. Murray also proposes that the pursuit of happiness be used as a framework for analyzing the efficacy of public policy, and he comes to the conclusion that Jeffersonian democracy is still the best way to run society, even today’s complex society.
Democracy in America. English Edition. Edited by Eduardo Nolla. Translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012). Vol. 2.
Democracy in America. English Edition. Edited by Eduardo Nolla. Translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012). Vol. 1.
Tocqueville’s Voyages: The Evolution of His Ideas and Their Journey Beyond His Time. Edited and with an introduction by Christine Dunn Henderson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014).
A two volume English only version of Liberty Fund’s 4 volume bi-lingual critical edition. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont visited the United States. From Tocqueville’s copious notes of what he had seen and heard came the classic text De la Démocratie en Amérique, published in two large volumes, the first in 1835, the second in 1840. The first volume focused primarily on political society; the second, on civil society.
Tocqueville’s Voyages is a collection of newly written essays by some of the most well-known Tocquevillian scholars today. The essays in the first part of the volume explore the development of Tocqueville’s thought, his intellectual voyage, during his trip to America and while writing Democracy in America. The second part of the book focuses on the dissemination of Tocqueville’s ideas beyond the Franco-American context of 1835–1840 in places such as Argentina, Japan, and Eastern Europe.
Peter J. Boettke, Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, argues that is a common trope to claim that F. A. Hayek experienced a crushing defeat in technical economics during the 1930s. At the beginning of the decade, Hayek emerged in the British scientific community as a leading economic theorist. Yet by the end of the decade Hayek was supposedly defeated in his debate both with Keynes and with Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner over market socialism. However, this narrative reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the teachings of economics from the classical to the early neoclassical economists. Economic life from Adam Smith to J. S. Mill never was treated as taking place in an institutional vacuum. Instead, law, politics, and social mores all constituted the institutional background against which economic life played out. As Boettke argues in the Lead Essay, Hayek’s epistemic institutionalism, as articulated in the 1930s and 1940s, provided the foundation for his own reconstruction and restatement of liberal political economy as evidenced in The Constitution of Liberty (1960) and Law, Legislation and Liberty (1973-79). Recognizing this aspect of Hayek’s thought is a first step to recognizing his broader contributions to economic science and the art of political economy. Boettke is joined in this discussion by Steven Horwitz, the John H. Schnatter Distinguished Professor of Free Enterprise in the department of economics at Ball State University, Roger Koppl, professor of finance in the Whitman School of Management of Syracuse University, and Adam Martin is a Political Economy Research Fellow at the Free Market Institute and an assistant professor in the department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University. See the Archive of Liberty Matters.