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In the eyes of its practitioners, economics is both a deductive science and an empirical science. The starting point of its deductions might be thought of as first principles. But what is the status of such principles? The tension between foundationalism, the idea that there are necessary and secure first principles for economic inquiry, and fallibilism, the idea that no belief can be certified as true beyond the possibility of doubt, is explored. Empirical disciplines require some sort of falsifiability. Yet, empirical inquiries also require a starting place—if not a necessarily true one, at least an indubitable one, that is, one that is not actually doubted. Indubitability appears to have necessary consequences, undercutting fallibilism, while fallibilism threatens confidence in the de facto first principles that begin inquiry. This tension is examined in three well-knownattempts to define economics and its method: John StuartMill’s economics as the science of wealth, Lionel Robbins’s economics as constrained optimization; and George Stigler and Becker’s attempt to reformulate neoclassical economics to square empiricism with Robbins’ deductivism.

Lionel Robbins is mainly known for An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, where he allegedly illustrated the neoclassical epistemology of economics, based on mechanistic maximizing behaviours of atomistic individuals whose aggregation results in the social order. Despite Robbins’s attempts to make it clear that this was not his concept of how the society works, this misrepresentation of his thought perpetuated in the methodological debates of the 1960s and is still dominant today. The aim of the paper is to challenge this caricature and illustrate the complex idea of social order held by Robbins, based on individual and collective processes of choices and a multilayer system of public institutions.

Contrary to some accounts, the Hayek-Robbins (\"Austrian\") theory of the business cycle did not prescribe a monetary policy of \"liquidationism\" in the sense of passive indifference to sharp deflation during the early years of the Great Depression. There is no evidence that Hayek or Robbins influenced any \"liquidationist\" in the Hoover administration or the Federal Reserve System. Federal Reserve policy during the Great Depression was instead influenced by the real bills doctrine, which (despite some apparent similarities) was diametrically opposed in key respects to Hayek's norms for central bank policy.

This study explores the pivotal role of theories of economics in shaping the multifaceted concept of sustainable development and integrates economic, social, and environmental dimensions. It traces the intellectual trajectory of classical, neoclassical, and contemporary economic paradigms, analysing their contributions to sustainability-oriented policies and practices. The study critically analyses key concepts, including equitable income redistribution, resource stewardship, and ecological preservation. It contrasts liberal and dependency theories while also comparing insights from environmental and ecological economics. Employing a rigorous literature review and comparative analytical methodology, the study bridges the theoretical foundations with real-world applications, illustrating the dynamic interplay between theories of economics and sustainability imperatives. The findings elucidate the dichotomy between weak and strong sustainability frameworks, advocating for ethical and interdisciplinary approaches to policymaking. By offering a comprehensive synthesis of the most influential theories of economics and sustainable development practices, this study provides profound insights for policymakers, academics, and practitioners seeking to address pressing global challenges through informed and integrative strategies.

Robbins' Essay gave economics a definition that came to dominate the professional literature. This definition laid a foundation that could be seen as justifying both the narrowing of economic theory to the theory of constrained maximization or rational choice and economists' ventures into other social science fields. Though often presented as self-evidently correct, both the definition itself and the developments that it has been used to support were keenly contested. This paper traces the reception, diffusion and contesting of the Robbins definition, arguing that this process took around three decades and that even then there was still significant dissent.

More than 90 years after Lionel Robbins more or less defined the subject ofeconomics in his famous essay, it is time to redress the issue in light of recent developments and new insights. Robbins used the figure of Robinson Crusoe to define homo economicus as an agent that makes choices in conditions of scarcity. By re-reading and re-interpreting the story of Crusoe, we make more sense of the narrative when we envisage people engaged in practices by which they realize what is important to them, that is, their values. Homo economicus becomes a special case pertinent to theinstrumental economies of markets and organizations. In the so-called human economies of the home, the social, cultural, and natural world, people use the inputs that they acquire in the instrumental economies to realize what is important to them, such as families, friendships, science, art, religion, meanings. This shift in perspective will have far reaching consequence for the way economists think and theorize and enables them to connect with the value-based approach that is increasingly dominatingthe worlds of business and politics.

This essay examines the administrative state as a ubiquitous phenomenon that results in part from the mismatch of incentives. Using two dramatic episodes in the history of economics, the essay considers two types of mismatch. It then examines how economists increasingly endorsed the “general good” as a unitary goal for society, even at the expense of private hopes and desires. More than this, their procedures and models gave them warrant to design mechanisms and advocate for legislation and regulations to “fix” the supposedly suboptimal choices of individuals in service to the overarching goal. The rise of New Welfare Economics dealt an additional blow to the sovereignty of individual motivations, notwithstanding that Hayek and Buchanan warned that this engineering approach allowed social goals to override individual preferences. Throughout, the argument is that it is important to recognize that people within or advising the administrative state are influenced by the same sorts of (private) motivations as actors throughout the economy.

This paper explores the intellectual context of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) during the 1930s. We will be focusing on the contributions of F.A. Hayek, along with Lionel Robbins, in fostering an intellectual environment for the transmission and incorporation of Austrian economics, particularly the works of Ludwig von Mises. In doing so we illustrate that Hayek and Robbins were attempting to craft a unified tradition of economic theory that consisted of various strands of economic thought that had either contributed to, or were consistent with, the Austrian tradition. The work done by Hayek, as well as Robbins, at the LSE not only consolidated the ideas of the Austrian tradition that had developed from Vienna. In doing so, they also rearticulated the broader theoretical contributions of classical political economy as a counterweight against an emerging neoclassical and Keynesian paradigm.

L’articolo intende proporre una prima sommaria ricognizione delle evidenze presenti nel fondo archivistico Ernesto Rossi in relazione ai rapporti intrattenuti da questi con economisti dell’accademia, tecnici e cultori di materie economiche che abbiano avuto con lui rapporti di frequentazione e collaborazione.

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.