Michael Zürn beleuchtet das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Globalisierung und liberaler Demokratie. Die Erwartung, dass die ökonomische Globalisierung den Siegeszug der Demokratie befördert, hat sich als Illusion entpuppt. Vielmehr hat sie zu wachsenden Konflikten in den westlichen Demokratien...

Since the dawn of their prolific collaboration in 1998, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson have confronted a plethora of cardinal questions in social sciences: Which institutions support long-term growth (Acemoglu et al., 2005)? What economic conditions facilitate the consolidation of...

Chapter 1 addresses the question, “What values do we encode and reproduce in the objects and systems that we design?” It argues that, currently, the values of white supremacist heteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, and settler colonialism are too often reproduced in the affordances and...

The terms of antitrust statutes – monopoly, competition, unfair methods of competition, conspiracy in restraint of trade – are inherently vague and not self-defining. The legislative histories of the Sherman, Clayton, Federal Trade Commission and Celler-Kefauver Acts are riddled with...

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the book that established the field of public choice – The Calculus of Consent by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. The year is also the thirtieth anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s “Covenants With and Without a Sword,” in which she...

This paper evaluates a possible US-SACU (Southern African Customs Union) free trade agreement as part of a US approach to new preferential trade agreements characterized by the term competitive liberalization.' This is the idea that competition among large countries (US/EU) to negotiate...

Liberalismus ist die Verfassungsphilosophie westlicher Gesellschaften. Liberale Prinzipien konstitu(tionalis)ieren die Wettbewerbsarenen der modernen Gesellschaft, so dass Konkurrenz für Kooperation in Dienst genommen wird, und zwar in der Wissenschaft, in der Wirtschaft und in der Politik.

The Abrahamic doctrine of liberty of the will can allow liberalism in the economy. For a century or so in academic theology, and stretching back to the early church and such revivals as the Radical Reformation, numerous Christian writers have denied such a liberalism. In the past century, for...

Liberalismus ist die Verfassungsphilosophie westlicher Gesellschaften. Liberale Prinzipien konstitu(tionalis)ieren die Wettbewerbsarenen der modernen Gesellschaft, so dass Konkurrenz für Kooperation in Dienst genommen wird, und zwar in der Wissenschaft, in der Wirtschaft und in der Politik.

F.A Hayek is one of the most important and influential advocates of liberalism in the 20th century. His theory is famously based on the concept of spontaneous order, an order emerging from the interaction of individuals without central control and appears critical of every form of...

This paper contextualizes the early political economy of Austrian economist and social philosopher F. A. Hayek in the intellectual milieu of German ordoliberalism. It argues that the particular urgency during the 1930s and 1940s to preserve and stabilize the disintegrating orders of economy and...

COVID-19 is provoking a major reorientation of American and European foreign policy. At the heart of this is their changing relationship with China. The pandemic has given rise to fears of a new Cold War, which are based on out-of-date assumptions and a misunderstanding of China’s motivations....

In addition to its connection with ideas of freedom, the word “liberal” is an apt descriptor of Smith’s plan in politics. Smith’s plan evinces attributes that are liberal in a non-political sense. Salient among these attributes is generosity and charity. The liberal plan, on Smith’s...

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology (2020) offers a powerful critique of ideological justifications for inequality in capitalist societies. Does this mean we should reject capitalist institutions altogether? This paper defends some aspects of capitalism by explaining the epistemic function...

With the post-war expansion of the welfare state, which provided a material basis for the adoption of social right as complementary to civil and political rights components of citizenship, there emerged an omnipresent conviction to assume that the institutionalization of citizenship in liberal...

This book profiles the lives and ideas of some of the leading thinkers on individual liberty - from ancient times to the present day - and sheds light on the key elements of liberal thought and those who shaped it across the centuries. The book identifies their common goals, but also highlights...

Are behavioral nudges consonant with the free society? Rizzo and Whitman argue that, with few exceptions, behavioral interventions aimed at addressing self-harms are unjustified and deleterious to freedom. At the core of their critique is a rejection of a narrow neoclassical account of...

There is a tension between libertarians’ optimism about private supply of public goods and skepticism of the viability of voluntary collusion (Cowen 1992, Cowen and Sutter 1999). Playing off this asymmetry, Cowen (1992) advances the novel argument that the “free market in defense services”...

The post-2016 populist wave has induced reflection on the neoliberal globalization, and the return to embedded liberalism has become an attractive solution. However, the current international division of labor and its corresponding constraints on policy autonomy mark a major departure from the...

This paper gives an interpretation of Michael Polanyi’s vision of government and economics as spanning between Hayek and Keynes. The influence of Hayek is manifested by his opposition to central planning and the defence of self-organization as a superior mechanism for coordinating individual...

We examine the institutional details of the school milk procurement process, bidding data, statements of dairy executives, and supply characteristics in Ohio during the 1980's. We compare the bidding behavior of a group of firms to a control group. We find that the behavior of each of the firms...

A growing retreat from multilateralism is threatening to upend the institutions that underpin the liberal international order. This article applies network theory to this crisis in global governance, arguing that policymakers can strengthen these institutions by leveraging network effect...

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens' support for the market by guaranteeing income redistribution to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to...

Rational players in game theory are neoliberal in the sense that they can choose any available action so as to maximize their payoffs. It is well known that this can result in Pareto inferior outcomes (e.g. the Prisoner’s Dilemma). Classical liberalism, in contrast, argues that people should...

Das Instrument des Emissionshandelssystems (EHS) wird von Umweltökonom:innen an prominenter Stelle zur Bewältigung der ökologischen Krisen sowohl im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs als auch in der Politikberatung empfohlen. Wir arbeiten drei implizite normative Prämissen des Lehrbuchmodells eines...

Die Soziale Marktwirtschaft in Deutschland als besonderer Typ der Koordinierten Markwirtschaften hat derzeit zusammen mit der Freien Marktwirtschaft einen neuen Konkurrenten im internationalen Systemwettbewerb erhalten: den Chinesischen Staatskapitalismus. Dies ist eine neue Herausforderung für...

In her recent book Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson makes a powerful but pragmatic case against the abuses experienced by employees in conventional corporations. The purpose of this review-essay is to contrast Anderson's pragmatic critique of many abuses in the employment relation with a...

In the summer of 2019, The Independent Review published a symposium on classical liberalism and social justice. We give an overview and commentary on the symposium papers. Rather than adopting the term social justice, we recommend returning to the three senses of justice maintained by Adam Smith...

As the U.S. Supreme Court became increasingly antipathetic to the recognition of individual rights, a different story was transpiring at the state level where a number of state courts had broken free of federal dominance of constitutional law and were turning to their state constitutions to...

This article examines the meaning of consumers' sovereignty in the interwar thought of the economist William Harold Hutt. For Hutt, consumers' sovereignty was an ideal, a norm against which economists could assess different economic systems. It connected the value of individual freedom, the...

What explains the simultaneous critiques of economic theory and liberalism during the 1930s? Early neoclassical economists had a common understanding of the proper institutional context under-girding a liberal market order. From the marginal revolution emerged a growing emphasis on analyzing...

This study assesses the potential gains from unilateral trade liberalization for the UK, against the background of a hard Brexit in which a hard border and tariff wall is erected between the UK and the European Union. Unilateral trade liberalization would allow the UK to expeditiously offset at...

Among studies on prospects and challenges of democratization in the developing world with particular reference to issues of democratic sustenance and consolidation, a very limited body of work understudies Africa. Today, some states in Africa where liberal democracy was thought to be taking root...

Rugged individualism—the combination of individualism and anti-statism—is a prominent feature of American culture with deep roots in the country's history of frontier settlement. Today, rugged individualism is more prevalent in counties with greater total frontier experience (TFE) during the...

Abstract: This paper examines criticisms of libertarian paternalism, focusing in particular on so-called knowledge problems: the set of problems associated with the question of whether a choice architect would, or even could, have sufficient information to implement a successful libertarian...

The libertarian defense of free enterprise, free trade, and freedom from government regulations and controls is grounded in a normative commitment to individual freedom. The majority of the economics profession, including the Chicago School, are committed in the first instance to methodological...