Lockdowns and their legitimacy in the context of Adam Smith’s economic philosophy and liberalism

For some years now Joyce Oldham Appleby has been engaged on a sequence of studies that together comprise an interlocking reinterpretation of the history of Anglo-American liberalism treated largely as an economic ideology. Her first book on Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England has recently been complemented by another entitled Capitalism and a New Social Order which extends her method and findings to Jeffersonian America at the beginning of the nineteenth century.' Both works contain an interesting amalgam of economic, social and intellectual history, where the last component encompasses both popular belief systems and treatments of the role played by ideological innovators. Since the ideology in question derives much of its content from distinctive and often quite abstract economic ideas, Appleby finds herself involved in the formal history of economic analysis even when the social and political connotations of the ideology appear to occupy the centre of the stage. While economic historians, notably D. C. Coleman, have provided critical assessments of Appleby's first book, considered as a contribution to English economic history and the debate on mercantilism,2 my main concern will be with the broader historiographic underpinnings of the Appleby version of the history of liberal ideology as revealed by her two books and related articles.

This contribution analyses the change in the conception of taxation which occurred in Italy during the aftermath of World War II. From being a neutral mechanism to collect state revenue, in this period taxation became seen as a powerful political tool to redistribute income and wealth. The article primarily relies on material collected by the Economic Commission of the Ministry for the Constituent Assembly set up in 1945, a unique source which offers a comprehensive overview of the different conceptions of taxation at the time. Drawing upon their different economic and political ideologies, liberal economists and entrepreneurs, Christian Democrats, and Communists formulated alternative tax programmes. While liberal economists and entrepreneurs advocated the maintenance of the existing tax system on technical grounds, the Christian Democrats imposed a new conception of taxation as a means for income redistribution. Progressive and redistributive taxation was also present in the Communist programme, but their ambiguous tax views suffered from the lack of administrative and economic experience which liberal and Catholic economists had instead gathered before and partially even during the Fascist regime. The debate ended abruptly in 1947 with the exclusion of the left from government and the success of liberal conceptions. Nonetheless, during the 1960s, the Catholic emphasis on progressive and redistributive taxation incorporated the new Keynesian ideas on public finance and achieved a hegemonic position in the public debate, thus overcoming the traditional liberal view.

Do students sort themselves based on economic ideology?

Economics and philosophy has a deep connection. It sometimes intertwined with each other whether economics needs philosophy or not. Philosophy of economics is a neccessity in order to understand the circumstances behind the economics events. Comprehension of such a neccessity can be complicated on certain occasions because of neoclassical economics thought. Neoclassical economics is also described as mainstream economics. This has long been a debate that critisizes mainstream economics. All followers critisizing mainstream economics are characterized as heterodox economics. Two of the fundemantal heterodox economics concepts are institutional economics and feminist economics. This study will therefore scrutinize mainstream economics in terms of the idea of old institutional economics and feminist economics.

Feminist economics, in its contemporary incarnation, began to bloom with the 1993 publication of Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics (Ferber and Nelson). Since then, many strains of feminist thinking have developed around issues of the definition, methodology, philosophy, and policy application of economics. One key insight has been the recognition of the mythical nature of the rational, autonomous “economic man” who was said to inhabit and operate the free market automaton. The crumbling of this image challenges theories of business and markets that see business as no more than rule-bound (i.e., bound to a supposed legal requirement to maximize profits, or to the “dictates of the market”)—and opens the way for serious new thinking about business ethics, responsibility, and care. In this essay, I will review these literatures, describing developments on topics including: how, historically, the images of “economic man” and machine-like market behavior came to gain credence; the role of masculinist intellectual biases in the continuing acceptance of the idea that economies are run by physics-like economic “laws;” alternative views of human nature emphasizing the many dimensions of relationality, including individuality, connection, interdependence, “power over”, “power to”, care, and responsibility; the treatment of paid and unpaid “caring labor,” historically mostly done by women, within economics and feminist economics; alternative images of commerce as being within “the social,” and including all aspects of human functioning, including ethical and caring behavior; and, the role of continued dualistic or non-relational thinking in shaping some aspects of contemporary debates about the ethics of care and the role of business in society. Literatures to be drawn on include the feminist philosophy of science, the history of economic thought, theological views on human relations and care, feminist ethics of care, feminist economics, moral theory, psychological research on moral attitudes and behavior, research on the economics of “caring labor” (e.g. nursing), business ethics, and my own previous works on these issues.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the nature of research methods in the history of economic thought. In reviewing the "techniques" which are involved in the discipline, four broader categories are identified: a) textual exegesis; b) "rational reconstructions"; c) "contextual analysis"; and d) "historical narrative". After examining these different styles of doing history of economic thought, the paper addresses the question of its appraisal, namely what is good history of economic thought. Moreover, it is argued that there is a distinction to be made between doing economics and doing history of economic thought. The latter requires the greatest possible respect for contexts and texts, both published and unpublished; the former entails constructing a theoretical framework that is in some respects freer, not bound by derivation, from the authors. Finally, the paper draws upon Econlit records to assess what has been done in the subject in the last two decades in order to frame some considerations on how the past may impinge on the future.

Inappropriate use of ivermectin during the COVID-19 pandemic: primum non nocere!

Feminist economics is a field that includes both studies of gender roles in the economy from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the economics discipline. It challenges economic analyses that treat women as invisible, or that serve to reinforce situations oppressive to women, and develops innovative research designed to overcome these failings. Feminist economics points out how subjective biases concerning acceptable topics and methods have compromised the reliability of economics research. Topics addressed include the economics of households, labour markets, care, development, the macroeconomy, national budgets, and the history, philosophy, methodology, and teaching of economics.

Feminist economics is a field that includes both studies of gender roles in the economy from a liberatory perspective and critical work directed at biases in the economics discipline. It challenges economic analyses that treat women as invisible, or that serve to reinforce situations oppressive to women, and develops innovative research designed to overcome these failings. Feminist economics points out how subjective biases concerning acceptable topics and methods have compromised the reliability of economics research. Topics addressed include the economics of households, labour markets, care, development, the macroeconomy, national budgets, and the history, philosophy, methodology, and teaching of economics.

Modern liberal economics is against the Buddhists economics. Unhealthy market competition, greed of money, top most professionalisms and economic depression and recessions are the dark side but reality of modern liberal economics. To avoid such negative consequences from livelihood, right livelihood, from a philosophy of noble eightfold path, Buddhists Economics will be a new dimension of new economic development. To check the current situation of Buddhists Economics in Nepalese Cooperatives and Agriculture a small literature review was conducted. From this review above specified hypothesis over the drawbacks of contemporary liberal economics have serious hegemony over small Nepalese Economy. Buddhists scholars must be able to impose the philosophy of Buddhists Economics in day to day life of people linked with business, production, cooperatives and agriculture.

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the philosophical origins of neoliberalism, especially through two great classics of nineteenth and twentieth century thought: Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hayek.The comparative analysis of some cornerstones of these two thinkers, which in other aspects are very different, aims to demonstrate how contemporary neoliberalism is the result of a long journey in the field of ideas. Yet, both the origins of neoliberalism can be traced to the distant past, as the effects of this economic ideology produce effects in the present time. Present time that is characterized by a pandemic emergency that reveals many points of contact with the foundations of the neoliberal ideology. In short, never as today rethinking Nietzsche and Hayek means understanding the limits and contradictions of a society afflicted by more than one virus. Neoliberalism; Spontaneous order; Innocence of becoming; Nietzsche; Hayek; political philosophy; Covid-19.

Liberalism, Disfigured

1. Introduction: Sketching the Contours of a Feminist Philosophy of Economics Part I. Re-reading History 2. 'Intro the Margin' 3. Hazel Kyrk and the Ethics of Consumption 4. Feminist Fiction and Feminist Economics: Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Efficiency 5. Beyond Markets: Wage Setting and the Methodology of Feminist Political Economy Part II. Science Stories and Feminist Economics 6. Some Implications of the Feminist Project in Economics for Empirical Methodology 7. Foregrounding Practices: Feminist Philosophy of Economics beyond Rhetoric and Realism 8. After Objectivism versus Relativism 9. How Did the 'moral' get split from the 'Economic'? Part III. Constructing Masculine/Western Identity in Economics 10. The Construction of Masculine Identity in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments 11. Social Classifications, Social Statistics and the 'Facts' of 'Difference' in Economics 12. A Reading of Neoclassical Economics: Toward an Erotic Economy of Sharing 13. The Anxious Identities we Inhabit Post'isms and Economic Understandings Part IV. Beyond Social Contract: Theorizing Agency and Relatedness 14. Holding Hands at Midnight: The Paradox of Caring Labor 15. Integrating Vulnerability: On the Impact of Caring on Economic Theory 16. An Evolutionary Approach to Feminist Economics: Two Different Models of Caring 17. Domestic Labor and Gender Identity: Are all Women Carers? Part V. Rethinking Categories 18. Empowering Work? Bargaining Models Reconsidered 19. Economic Marginalia: Postcolonial Readings of Unpaid Domestic Labor and Development 20. The Difficulty of a Feminist Economics

Originally published over two decades ago, this classic text within the philosophy of economics is a tour de force against revealed preference. It critically examines the research programme carried out by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson on the revealed preference approach to the theory of consumer behaviour. It also challenges two essential premises: that the programme has been completed that the various contributions of Samuelson are mutually consistent. This text contains a new preface by Wong, in which he provides a detailed insight into the origins of his pioneering text, and a new introduction from Philip Mirowski, analyzing the impact The Foundation of Paul Samuelson’s Revealed Preference Theory has had on the discipline of economics as well as explaining why it remains core reading for economists today.The defining statement of economic method, this book will be of interest to economists everywhere.

Review of Cyril Hedoin's L'institutionnalisme historique et la relation entre theorie et histoire en economie [Historical institutionalism and the relation between theory and history in economics]. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013, 435 pp.This book originates from Cyril Hedoin's doctoral work on institutionalism in economic thought. It supplies extensive knowledge on the founding figures of institutional economics (Gustav von Schmoller, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, and Karl Polanyi), which makes it a potential textbook on the subject, and it provides a detailed analysis of what defines an authentically institutionalist to economics (p. 9). Because economists can say we're all Institutionalists now (p. 7, emphasis in the original), the author reflects on the identity of what he and other French economists call historical institutionalism-a research programme that is distinct from (and critical of) mainstream economics and its method of analysing institutions. The adjective 'historical' not only refers to an approach that emphasizes the history of economic thought, but also suggests the specific criterion of demarcation used by Hedoin to identify the essence of this heterodox institutionalism. This approach recognizes the importance of the historicity of social phenomena and of social knowledge, and therefore investigates the relation between theory and history. This book also contributes to the history of ideas, the philosophy of economics, and the economics of institutions.By using two categories of Imre Lakatos's methodology of science, Hedoin proposes a rational reconstruction of the thought of Schmoller, Weber, Veblen, Commons, and Polanyi in order to delineate the hard core of the research programme of historical institutionalism. The choice to concentrate on these five authors (thus avoiding the reduction of historical institutionalism to American institutionalism) is based on their importance for this research programme: they are representative of its identity and offer significant insights that relate theory and history which, for the main part, are convergent and often complementary. Hedoin interprets these authors by analysing the logical connection between theory and history: specifically, this refers to the epistemological issue of historicization of theory (i.e., the method of social knowledge) and the substantive issue of theorization of history (i.e., the explanation of historical dynamics). The book is structured according to these mirror issues in order to analyse the primary methodological and theoretical principles that characterize historical institutionalism.Part one of the book develops what Hedoin identifies as the three principles underlying the historicization of theory: (1) consideration and treatment of the problem of historical specificity (this addresses the tension between the general and the particular); (2) adoption of methodological institutionalism (this addresses the tension between action and structure); and (3) appeal to abduction and ideal types as methods of knowledge (this addresses the tension between concept and reality). Hedoin begins with an exploration of the philosophical foundations of these principles which have their basis, according to him, in German neo-Kantian philosophy (Wilhelm Dilthey, Heinrich Rickert) and American pragmatist philosophy (Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey). Although there are differences between these philosophical traditions, they share a common emphasis on the historicity of science, which opposes the positivist epistemology that has dominated economics. Neo-Kantianism is, Hedoin states, the first philosophy to deal with the relation between theory and history; it addresses the specificity of the cultural sciences and aims to establish their scientific legitimacy. Pragmatism makes a decisive contribution (p. 63) by articulating connections between its theory of knowledge and its theory of action; these connections underlie all three principles for historicizing theory, especially in the social sciences. …