This paper compares and contrasts two schools of political economy: the Austrian School, prominent members of which include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; and the Bloomington School, which was founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is argued that the two traditions share a good deal in...

Elinor Ostrom (2011) describes the work of James Buchanan as “foundational” to the Bloomington approach to political economy. This chapter explores the relationship between Buchanan's “Virginia School” approach to that of the Bloomington School. We examine the foundational role of the...

The ‘Swedish Model’ of the welfare state was born from a confluence of geographic, cultural, political, and economic factors in the immediate post-war period. Its intellectual history, however, lay in a much longer tradition that originated with the economist Knut Wicksell (1851 – 1926). A...

This paper takes off from Jan Kregel's paper "Shylock and Hamlet, or Are There Bulls and Bears in the Circuit?" (1986), which aimed to remedy shortcomings in most expositions of the "circuit approach". While some "circuitistes" have rejected John Maynard Keynes's liquidity preference theory,...

The method appropriate to the historical and conceptual investigation of Hayek’s ideas is implicit in his own writings on the methodology of disciplines that study complex phenomena. The phenomena of Hayek’s career are complex phenomena requiring a method appropriate to this complexity.

From the early-1950s on, F.A. Hayek was concerned with the development of a methodology of sciences that study systems of complex phenomena. Hayek argued that the knowledge that can be acquired about such systems is, in virtue of their complexity (and the comparatively narrow boundaries of human...

Paolo Sylos Labini (1920-2005) was the one of the most influential economists in Italy after the Second World War. After graduating in 1942, Sylos Labini won a fellowship in the USA. After an initial period in Chicago, he moved to Harvard, where he was able to attend Schumpeter's lectures from...

Historians of economic thought are paying greater attention to issues of social ontology (that is, to the assumptions that economists make about the nature of social reality). In this paper, we contribute to this burgeoning literature by exploring the hitherto neglected way in which James...

The modern approach to the market as a place with autonomy depends on a certain view of money. According to that view, money is a neutral technology that expresses individual choices made about real goods and services. But the controversies over money that regularly arise in political...

This paper uses the theory of complex systems as a conceptual lens through which to compare the work of Friedrich Hayek and Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. It is well known that, from the 1950s onwards, Hayek conceptualised the market as a complex adaptive system. It is argued in this paper that,...