The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the Austrian school’s methodological orientation, which they named “subjectivism,” in a way that shows its affinity with the main thrust of John Dewey’s notion of the logic of inquiry. It is trying to make two distinct but related points. First,...

Israel Kirzner has made important contributions to our understanding of the critical role that entrepreneurship plays in markets and has considerable influence in economics, public policy and entrepreneurship studies. For Kirzner, understanding the role of the entrepreneur is essential to...

For North, the "intellectual entrepreneurs of ideology" or "ideological entrepreneurs" can and often do play a key role in ideological change. Although ideological entrepreneurs play such a key role in bringing about ideological and, so, institutional change, Douglas North does not devote a lot...

While there is now a large literature on the negative aspects of social capital, recent discussions of social capital within the public choice literature have tended to focus on the positive role of social capital in solving collective action problems and promoting political accountability....

The aim of the social sciences is to explain and understand social phenomena. They are concerned with how the purposeful action of individuals operating on the basis of their own peculiar knowledge of their particular circumstances of time and place bring about orders that no single mind did or...

This paper argues that in order to understand West Indian economic underdevelopment, the saliency of the informal institutions that emerged during its colonial period and the effect these institutions have had on the emergence of a local entrepreneurial class can not be discounted. British...

Culture shapes economic action and, as such, impacts economic life. Although there is a growing recognition amongst economists that culture matters, there is nothing approaching a universal agreement on how to incorporate culture into economic analysis. We provide a brief summary of how...

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or...