Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper contributes to the literature which questions the idea that the left-right axis still characterizes the political landscape, and challenges the view that the 2017 French election marked a sharp discontinuity in the development of French politics. It analyzes election outcomes using an original source of information on voters’ preferences using a method that leads to an alternative reading of the politics of the 2017 French presidential election. Firstly, the use of experimental data on approval voting enables us to provide a new narrative of the election process and outcome. Secondly, we introduce a procedure that generates an endogenous political axis, and construct indices revealing how and why the conventional approach opposing left to right is only partially relevant. In particular, the younger the voters, the less they conform to a left-right axis. However, we show that this does not represent a rejection of existing parties, as the official results would suggest, but an erosion in the voters’ minds of barriers between distinct political camps, and between traditional and populist parties.

This paper discusses the relationship of the two models of man presented by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations —and the working of the invisible hand. There appears to be an inherent conflict of the market solution and the working of the price mechanism with “sympathy,” the key concept proposed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , the source of social evaluation, self-evaluation and individual action—and the impartial spectator controlling individual action. We will give an extended explanation for this incongruence and, given this background, elaborate on Smith’s social program of educating the common people. References to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice , Ken Binmore’s evolutionary theory of fairness, and Karl Polanyi’s critical comments in The Great Transformation on the emergence of the market society demonstrate that Smith does not give us a moral theory but a tool kit for moral behavior, on the one hand, and conditions and implications of a market economy, on the other—exemplified by the two models of man which he applies.

This paper examines the connections between Isaac Newton, Robert Simson, and Adam Smith, highlighting the influence of the Newtonian scientific method. Smith, influenced by Simson’s teachings, regarded Simson as a leading mathematician of their time. Simson’s innovative application of ancient porisms to explain Newtonian fluxions challenged existing perspectives and had a profound impact on the Scottish Enlightenment, which in turn shaped Smith’s seminal work,  The Wealth of Nations . This paper clarifies how Smith integrated the Newtonian method into his philosophical and economic theories, emphasizing the interconnections among these influential figures and their lasting contributions.

Public Choice does not seem any longer to be a vivid part of the academic literature. The newly introduced version called “Political Economics” partly takes up some of the aspects previously discussed in Public Choice. Whether this new version of political economy has much, or any, impact on economics or political decisions is open. In real life, the ideas contained in Public Choice are more important than ever. Future generations of economists and social scientists may well come back to the important insights gained. This may take considerable time. Public Choice Scholars, therefore, have the important task to stick to their convictions.

In the light of Giuseppe Eusepi’s career-long interest in the subjectivist element of James Buchanan’s work, my strategy here is to follow Eusepi by outlining and situating the variety of subjectivism discussed by Buchanan and, after some critical discussion, to attempt to track some of the implications of that subjectivism for the idea of constitutionalism, particularly of the contractarian variety, and some of the limitations imposed by subjectivism. To be clear, what follows is not strictly an attempt at the detailed reconstruction of either Buchanan’s or Eusepi’s position, but rather a discussion of subjectivism, constitutionalism, and the linkages between these two themes that is inspired by Buchanan and Eusepi.

The paper examines evolutionary elements in Adam Smith’s social theory, connecting them to an earlier contribution to natural history by George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. It then compares Smith’s analysis with those of Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, who were fascinated by Darwinian evolutionary biology. This comparison demonstrates that while developing evolutionary approaches to the social sciences suitable for their respective subject matter, Marx and Schumpeter drew heavily on Smith’s insights. All three authors aimed to unveil the forces shaping the “process of civilization”, or society’s “law of motion,” along with its associated hazards. They pondered whether this process inherently led to rising living standards, along with “equality, liberty, and justice”, and whether it could derail, ending in a tailspin.