One’s ideological views – that is, the pattern of positions one tends to take on important public-policy issues – run deep and change little. Inevitably they involve commitments and judgments about the most important things. Just as we value disclosure of vested interests, we value...

The Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Private Enterprise featured a complicated set of papers (link to the issue). The lead article was a long paper by Jason Briggeman and me, on Israel Kirzner’s work on coordination and discovery. The thrust of our paper was an affirmation of Kirzner’s...

We explore the conjecture, first hinted at by Peter Minowitz, that Smith deliberately placed his central idea, as represented by the phrase “led by an invisible hand,” at the physical center of his masterworks. The four most significant points developed are as follows: (1) The physical...

In this very casual paper, I reproduce results from the Google Ngram Viewer. The main thrust is to show that around 1880 governmentalization of society and culture began to set in — a great transformation, as Karl Polanyi called it. But that great transformation came as a reaction to...

Social science fledglings can improve their theorizing by focusing on three questions: Theory of what?, Why should we care?, and What merit in your explanation? This suite of questions takes the spine of theory to be explanation. Explanation has a counterpart in the thing to be explained, the...

Adam Smith infused the expression “impartial spectator” with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which normally would aptly take the definite article the, and which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator of an...

Karl Mittermaier (1938-2016) was a classical liberal economist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He completed a work in 1986 titled The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand: Dogmatic and Pragmatic Views on Free Markets and the State of Economic Theory, being published in 2020 for the...

These brief, casual remarks were delivered at an event to discuss Russell Roberts’s book How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life. I provide nine quotations from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, each quotation stating a source of vice, disorder, and corruption in human life. Smith...

This article is part of a symposium (in Society) on a target article by Amitai Etzioni. Using that article as a point of departure, I take the opportunity to elaborate a reading of Adam Smith's moral philosophy that sees it as quite non-foundationalist. Whereas foundationalism's metaphor is a...

One aspect of the present paper is to draw out the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek. I suggest that common economic talk of market communication, market error and correction, and policy error and correction invokes a spectatorial being and appeals to our sympathy with such being. Behind such common...