Frank H. Knight's antagonism to religion is well-known, and features prominently in his writings from the 1930s on. But during the 1920s, when he was a professor at the University of Iowa and wrote some of his most important essays on the limitations of economics, Knight was an active...

Jim Buchanan kept pictures of Knut Wicksell and Frank H. Knight on his office wall. Yet a careful look at Buchanan's work indicates that it ran counter to that of Frank H. Knight. Knight and Buchanan disagreed on the methodological, economic, ethical, and political assumptions that drove their...

James M. Buchanan revisited his mentor's famous 1923 essay “The Ethics of Competition” in an essay written for the centenary celebration of Frank Knight's birth in 1985. Buchanan's paper focused on the first section of Knight's essay, and outlined why it provided an inadequate criticism of a...

Note. These two presuppositions carry the discussion beyond the level of pure science, but do not introduce ethics. The fact that choice is real is different from the question whether one choice is “better” than another. This is the essence of individualism, that values are real, but that...

On August 23, 1927, the great and heroic state of Massachusetts killed a fish peddler and a cobbler. It had been intending and most intently wishing to kill them quick, but it took 7 years to set its courage to the sticking point. After all the profound and earnest observation and animadversions...

One often hears the argument that Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments provides a basis for the construction of a morality independent of a religion based on revelation. Central to this argument is Smith’s impartial spectator, whose study of human motivation through observation of the...