What was Adam Smith's intellectual laboratory? How did his economic theory take shape? Were his metaphors of order only residual and ornamental expressions? This book answers these questions by analyzing the formation of the concepts of market and social order in Adam Smith's work, by...

The aim of the paper is to show that Adam Smith elaborated a distinctive image of nature related to economic discourse. In Smith, visible events (or interdependencies) must be connected to invisible principles which, in particular, should provide an explanation of the self-coordination processes...

Hayek opposes the explanation of the emergence of institutions as “spontaneous (unintentional) order”, which he considers correct, against “constructivism” (viewed as erroneous). This dichotomy exhibits some inconsistencies, for, on Hayek’s account, constructivist ideologies seem able...

First, the paper seeks to show that Herbert Simon's notion of bounded rationality should be interpreted in light of its connection with artificial intelligence. Second, offering four paradigmatic examples, the article presents the view that recent approaches that draw upon Simon's heterodox...

This paper analyses two concepts considered antithetical by Hayek: constructivism and spontaneous order. The thesis is that the spontaneous order theory does not exhaustively explain the change of social systems divergent from market ones. More precisely, Hayek's approach lacks in a theory of...

The thesis put forward in this paper is that Herbert A. Simon was a distinctive theoretician of decentralized decisional systems alternative to the market, from planning to organizations. This issue emerges from the convergence of four perspectives, each with a different role and influence on...