Carl Menger’s objective in his seminal book, Principles of Economics, was to elucidate a unified account of price formation. This raises a question, which motivates our paper: to what extent, if any, can Menger account for production not directly organized by the price mechanism, and therefore...

In this paper we revisit the case for methodological individualism for the positive analysis of political economy. We argue that the basis of methodological individualism implies neither a necessary commitment to atomistic reductionism in explaining social phenomena nor philosophical...

The purpose of this chapter is an attempt to reconstruct the evolution of North's approach to understanding economic history. Underlying this evolution has been an increasing recognition of the role that transaction costs play in explaining the economic performance of different societies through...

The particular focus of this chapter will be to analyze institutional change from an Ostromian perspective by analyzing the relationship between self-governance, polycentricity, and federalism. Throughout work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, there exist two consistent themes regarding the...

McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality explains the Great Enrichment of man beginning in the early 19th century as being caused by what we refer to as a “combustible combination” of ideas, institutions, and commercial practices. Economic growth for McCloskey is not just a function of the security of...

This paper argues that liberty and progress arose due to the generalized increasing returns to economic activity. These increasing returns follow from the gradual, cumulative process of institutionalizing liberties. As a society adopts an institutional framework from accumulated liberties, there...