Frank Knight and the Chicago School in American Economics

Description

Over the last twenty years, Ross B. Emmett has explored the work of Frank H. Knight, the philosopher of the Chicago School of economics. Knight occupies a paradoxical place in the history of Chicago economics: vital to the tradition’s teaching of price theory and the twentieth-century re-articulation of the defense of free enterprise and liberal democracy, yet a critic (in advance) of the empirical and methodological orientation that has characterized Chicago economics and the rest of the discipline in the post-war period, and skeptical of liberalism’s prospects. In the course of his investigation of Knight’s work, Emmett has written not only about Knight’s economics and philosophy, the nature of Chicago economics, and Knight’s place in the Chicago tradition, but also about the application of hermeneutic theory to the history of economics, the relation of the history of economic thought to the discipline of economics, and the relation between economics and religion. His eight-volume collection of primary-source material on The Chicago Tradition in Economics, 1892-1945 was published by Routledge in 2001. Dedication Contents Preface Original publication information Foreword • Warren J. Samuels Foreword • A. M. C. Waterman Section I: Historical reconstruction in the history of economics 1 Exegesis, hermeneutics, and interpretation 2 Reflections on “breaking away”: Economics as science and the history of economics as history of science Section II: Interpreting Frank Knight 3 The therapeutic quality of Frank Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit 4 The Economist and the Entrepreneur: Modernist impulses in Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit 5 Frank Knight’s dissent from Progressive social science 6 “What is truth” in capital theory?: Five stories relevant to the evaluation of Frank Knight’s contributions to the capital controversy 7 Maximizers versus good sports: Frank Knight’s curious understanding of exchange behavior 8 Frank Knight on the conflict of values in economic life Section III: Interpreting Frank Knight and Chicago economics 9 Frank Knight, Max Weber, Chicago economics, and institutionalism 10 Entrenching disciplinary competence: The role of general education and graduate study in Chicago economics 11 De gustibus est disputandum: Frank Knight’s reply to George Stigler and Gary Becker’s “De gustibus non est disputandum” with an introductory essay 12 Did the Chicago School reject Frank Knight?: Assessing Frank knight’s place in the Chicago economics tradition Section IV: Economics, religion, and politics 13 Frank Knight: Economics versus religion 14 Is economics a religion? 15 The idea of a secular society revisited Notes References Index