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.

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The American political economist Henry George devoted his life to the single tax. Virtually forgotten today, his best seller "Progress and Poverty" influenced numerous people in the English-speaking world. His fame and fall were due to a temporary alliance with the American Irish Catholics who were agitating for the land war in Ireland and social change in their new homeland. So significant was this tidal wave of support that it swamped the American consciousness in the late 1870s and early 1880s including prelates of the Roman Catholic Church, some of whom were conservatively inclined. George astutely navigated the waters by working with the radical editor of "The Irish World", Patrick Ford. But then George made a politically awkward friendship with Father Edward McGlynn, an ardent supporter of modernism and the single tax, who was a constant irritant to the church hierarchy and subsequently excommunicated. The issues that McGlynn raised rocked the American Catholic Church and the Vatican itself. The counter-campaign waged by the church and devout Irish Catholics blocked McGlynn and put an end to George1's fleeting success....

This book contains refereed articles on: contrasting relational conceptions of the individual in recent economics; the development of Adam Smith's style of lecturing; a comparison of problems encountered in the historian's work as editor, based upon editing Harrod's papers and Haberler's "Prosperity and Depression"; reminisciences on the New Deal by Jacob Viner; and Don Lavoie's lectures on comparative economic systems. It reviews essays on books about Schumpeter, Keynes, Mincer, comparative economic history, and the Chicago School; as well as reviews of books dealing with the repeal of the Corn Laws, economic systems and economic growth, the Enlightenment and post-modernism, and virtue ethics and capitalism....