Once economics came to be understood as the scientific investigation of the operation of markets, economic theorists pushed ethical and metaphysical concerns outside their realm of study. After the separation, the claims of Christian theology had no more jurisdiction over the discipline of...

The main point of this paper is to contribute to understanding Milton Friedman’s (1953) “The Methodology of Positive Economics” (hereafter F1953), one of the most influential statements of economic methodology of the twentieth century, and, in doing so, help discern the non trivial but...

This paper discusses the following two hypotheses. The first one is based on the epistemological proposal which we have named the principle of discontinuity. It asserts that certain developments in the history of economic thought involve theoretical breaks which can only be fully explained by...

The meaning of Methodological Individualism has been one of the most diversified concepts and is one of the basic methodological principles of the social sciences. It indicates an orderly, repeatable and self-correcting research procedure whose object of study is individuals and their set of...

The present paper considers the implications of the postulate that the activities of scientists constitute complex phenomena in the sense associated with the methodological writings of the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian economist, methodologist, and political philosopher, F.A. Hayek. Although...

This paper focuses on Ludwig von Mises methodological apriorism. It uses Wittgenstein’s private language argument as the basis for a critique of Mises’s claim to have found apodictically certain foundations for economic analysis. It is argued instead that Mises’s methodology is more...

Although Ronald Coase is popularly associated with the Chicago School, his approach belongs to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century British tradition. In this essay, we address whether the Coasean or traditional British methodology can offer improvements to current methods. Current...

In economics, thought experiments are frequently justified by the difficulty of conducting controlled experiments. They serve several functions, such as establishing causal facts, isolating tendencies, and allowing inferences from models to reality. In this paper, I argue that thought...

Robert Lucas is rightfully credited with having changed the course of macroeconomic theory. The aim of this paper is to document his transformation from a potential contributor to Keynesian macroeconomics to the master builder of an alternative paradigm, equilibrium macroeconomics. I reconstruct...

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Italian scholars started using a scientific methodology to tackle public finance problems. Their studies are now referred to as the Italian tradition in public finance, whose origin is considered to lie with De Viti de Marco (1888). Shortly before...