The purpose of this article is to analyse the way economists interested in social and economic evolution cite, mention or refer to Darwin. We focus on the attitude of economists towards Darwin's theory of social evolution - an issue he considered as central to his theory. We show that economists...

During the 1950s and 1960s, many economists were convinced that externalities were a cause of "market failures" -- because individuals are not capable of internalizing the costs their actions impose to others -- and therefore that the intervention of the state was necessary to allow an efficient...

In this paper, an agency model is proposed, which allows us not only to compare a unitary state with a federation but also to represent the various forms of federalism. The concept of subsidiarity is used to explain how responsibilities are assigned between the different institutional levels....

How do economists defme democracy? Such is the question this paper tries to deal with. We contrast two economists' views on democracy. First, we show how, within the framework of public choice theory, the use of the tools and methodology of mainstream economic analysis, the focus put upon...

In spite of the clear objective assigned to the integration process in the 1950s, the institutional status of the European Union remains ambiguous and uneasy to define. The argument that we present in this article is that Europe has always hesitated between two forms of federalism. We use an...

The thesis that judges could (voluntarily or not) promote efficiency through their decisions has largely been discussed since Posner put it forward in the early 1970s. There nonetheless remains a methodological aspect that has never (to our knowledge) been analyzed and that we address in this...