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...

This document offers an English translation of remarks that Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours made in 1809, remarks principally about Adam Smith. Dupont suggests repeatedly that Adam Smith fudged some points in The Wealth of Nations, because, says Dupont, Smith “thought that in order to maintain...

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...

Smith’s two-sentence rebuke of the slave trade was quoted in full four times in early anti-slavery literature. It helps us make sense of Part V of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and understand Smith’s posture toward slavery. Also, it might inform our understanding of the relationship between...