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Among twentieth century inheritors of the classical liberal mantle, the notion that democracy could be understood as “government by discussion” is found most prominently in the work of Frank H. Knight and James M. Buchanan. The purpose of the present paper is to compare Knight and Buchanan’s use of the expression “democracy is government by discussion”. Knight adopted the expression in reference to the means by which (a) individuals coordinate decisions and actions to facilitate constitutional decisions about social action and (b) we coordinate society’s norms and values. For Buchanan, democracy as discussion occurs only at the level of constitutional decisions. Thus, while their use of the expression unites them, it also provides a way of examining the divide between them.

Frank H. Knight's magnum opus Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit, published in 1921, is widely recognized for introducing and establishing the distinction between risk and uncertainty. It is also known for developing a novel theory of the firm and business profit based on entrepreneurial judgment. However, the work's relevance for institutionalism has only rarely been addressed or even acknowledged. This introduction to the special issue organized to celebrate the centenary of Knight's tome briefly summarizes the work's institutionalist implications and the articles that comprise the special issue.

The creation school of opportunity formation is a relatively new partial theory of entrepreneurship built upon a relatively new approach to theorizing. Given their significant respective impacts, we critically evaluate both that school and that approach to better understand their respective values to theorizing. We apply a comprehensive, critical framework to evaluate the creation school. We determine that it is not yet a theory, but that it raises several important theoretical questions, from the origins of valuable heterogeneity to which meta-heuristics should be assumed and to what types of uncertainty are involved in entrepreneurial opportunities. We then describe its comparison-based approach for theorizing, delineating it from similar approaches that also contrast against the given benchmark ideas in a field, to determine its benefits and costs to advancing the modeling of phenomena. We determine that this new approach differs from problematization and constrastivity; instead of developing assumptions from induction, it uses a strawman to simply assert them. We finish by discussing the implications for how we can take more control over what kinds of theories affect the definition, and the legitimacy earned, in important fields of research like entrepreneurship.

The last two chapters of Frank H. Knight's Risk, Uncertainty and Profit are seldom cited and frequently ignored. But in those chapters, Knight moves from entrepreneurial judgment and organizational strategies to meet the dilemmas uncertainty presents in a firm to the wider question of how uncertainty affects the social organization of economic activity. Ignoring the concluding chapters of Knight's book means we miss an important part of his early career thoughts on the tradeoffs between free enterprise and the social organization of economic activity. The purpose of the paper is to lay out the perspective on social economic organization that he took in the final two chapters of his first major work against the context of his other contemporary writings.

The politics of financial governance under conditions of uncertainty has re-emerged as a significant issue for scholars of International Political Economy and related fields, not least because of the fallout from the 2007-2008 financial crisis. In this article I assess the legacy of Frank H. Knight's Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit for debates about reconceptualising financial governance and fostering financial stability. I argue Knight's book is productive in assisting understanding of the fallacies of the ‘risk-based’ economic theory tending to underpin financial governance, in particular drawing attention to the limitations of social scientific knowledge that reduce governance capacity and increase uncertainty in financial markets. I further argue, after Knight's deliberately paradoxical approach, that uncertainty in finance might be beyond regulation but at the same time there is still a societal need to attempt to achieve a politics of uncertainty that can cope with ignorance of the future through experimental governmental efforts.

In 1921, Houghton and Mifflin finally published the second-place essay from the 1917 Hart, Schaffner, and Marx economics dissertation competition. The publisher must have been exasperated with the author, Frank H. Knight, and his two supervisors, J. M Clark and A. A. Young, all of whom claimed that \"minor corrections\" had taken four years. In fact, Knight's presentation of the theory of perfect competition was revised, the material on uncertainty and entrepreneurial judgment was expanded, and a much longer discussion of the relevance of the book's themes to the social control of economic processes was added to the final chapter. Even the manuscript's title was changed, from \"Cost, Value, and Profit\" to Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit} When Knight submitted the essay to the competition, he was still at Cornell University, reading economic theory as a postdoctoral scholar with Herbert Davenport. When Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (Knight 1921b) was finally published, he was a tenured associate professor of economics at the University of Iowa, with a key criticism of Alfred Marshall's price theory already published (Knight 1921a). In between, he had spent two years as an instructor of statistics for the Economics Department at the University of Chicago.

The Chicago school of economics has long emphasised the efficiency of decision makers in a competitive economic order in comparison to those in a democratic political order. The purpose of our article is to show that this emphasis emerged from two different re-conceptualisations of liberal democracy by Chicago economists during the post-war period The first was Frank H. Knight's enquiry into whether rational norms for intelligent democratic action provided the means to avoid the failures of liberalism that had become so apparent through the upheavals of the first several decades of the twentieth century. The second came from Aaron Director, who concluded instead that democratic action was inherently irrational and disputatious, and that the efficiency of actions undertaken with the context of the competitive order was to be preferred. Knight argued that an appreciation for competition must be accompanied by recognition of the equally fundamental roles of democratic discussion and ethics, whilst Director asserted the fundamental role of competition in the economic realm and its import for freedom.