Philosophy and Methodology

The first sections of this paper consider, respectively, the following two problems that arise when dimensions are not correctly included in economic models: 

Confronted with the limitations of formalism, many economists have adopted alternative epistemological approaches which are supposed to favor a better understanding of economic phenomena. Among those, hermeneutics has enjoyed a certain success. Hermeneutics is a general theory of understanding based on the interpretation of an external reality testifying to an internal subjective reality. In economics, the interpretive act (or the process of theorization) consists in the ongoing dialogic confrontation between what contemporary economists know and what the individuals under scrutiny express of their own interpretation of the world.

A sizable number of examiners of Austrian economics have come to hold a mistaken view that Hoppe’s and Rothbard’s stances on the nature and status of the action axiom are fundamentally incompatible.

There are two Coase theorems. The simplistic one deals with the unrealistic world of zero transactions costs. The more important one addresses itself to the real world, where transactions costs are positive, 

The 403 issues of Liberty which appeared have been reprinted and made available by the Greenwood Reprinting Corporation.

Murray Rothbard, in a paper entitled “The Ethics of Liberty,” argued that the standard for moral goodness is set by man’s nature.

In this paper, Christopher W. Morris attempts to defend the natural right of freedom from the premise of human autonomy.

The dislocation of established patterns of thought and behavior, under pressure of the kaleidoscopic changes that for convenience we often ascribe

That philosophic ideas count is no news to Austrian economists, whose economic theories rest on conceptual analyses of action and value.

The twentieth century libertarian movement has experienced an ongoing debate between the minarchists, the advocates of “limited” govern