Economic vs. juristic thinking in Carl Menger’s principles of economics

Austrian Economic School is increasingly being treated as one of the most significant and ever more influential bodies of ideas affecting the contemporary economic science. It is well known that Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School, was a lawyer by education. The paper is devoted to the degree to which his legal education influenced his economic theorizing. After a close examination of the Menger’s conceptual apparatus and the epistemological ramifications of the key notions underlying his thinking, the paper concludes that the juristic background of the far-reaching theoretical contributions contained in Menger’s Principles was truly decisive. That holds true despite the fact that Menger only exceptionally utilized the juristic vocabulary. The key ingredients of his theoretical creation? such as the individual autonomy, the coincidence of the wills in concluding a contract the effective protection of property and making transactions based on the individual motivation to further one’s own interests to the utmost? are clearly inspired and in many ways influenced by private law, particularly the doctrines underlying the Roman Law and the Austrian Civil Code

Governance, Coordination and Evaluation: the case for an epistemological focus and a return to C.E. Lindblom

While much political science research focuses on conceptualizing and analyzing various forms of governance, there remains a need to develop frameworks and criteria for governance evaluation (Torfing et al 2012). The post-positivist turn, influential in recent governance theory, emphasizes the complexity, uncertainty and the contested normative dimensions of policy analysis. Yet a central evaluative question still arises concerning the capacity of governance networks to facilitate ‘coordination’. The classic contributions of Charles Lindblom, although pre-dating the contemporary governance literature, can enable further elaboration of and engagement with this question. Lindblom’s conceptualisation of coordination challenges in the face of complexity shares with post-positivism a recognition of the inevitably contested nature of policy goals. Yet Lindblom suggests a closer focus on the complex, dynamically evolving, broadly ‘economic’ choices and trade-offs involved in defining and delivery policy for enabling these goals to be achieved and the significant epistemological challenges that they raise for policy-makers. This focus can complement and enrich both post-positivist scholarship and the process and incentives-orientated approaches which predominate in contemporary political science research on coordination in governance. This is briefly illustrated through a short case study evaluating governance for steering markets towards delivering low and zero carbon homes in England

Liberalization, globalization and the dynamics of democracy in India

In the closing decades of the twentieth century there has been an almost complete intellectual triumph of the twin principles of marketization (understood here as referring to the liberalization of domestic markets and freer international mobility of goods, services, financial capital and perhaps, more arguably, labour) and democratization . A paradigm shift of this extent and magnitude would not have occurred in the absence of some broad consensus among policymakers and (sections of) intellectuals around the globe on the desirability of such a change. There seems to be a two-fold causal nexus between marketization and democracy. The first is more direct, stemming from the fact of both systems sharing certain values and attitudes in common. But there is also a second more indirect chain from marketization to democracy, which is predicated via three sub-chains (i) from marketization to growth, (ii) from growth to overall material development welfare and (iii) from material development to social welfare and democracy. We examine each of these sub-links in detail with a view to obtaining a greater understanding of the hypothesized role of free markets in promoting democracies. In the later part of the paper we examine the socio-economic outcomes governing the quality of democracy in a specifically Indian context

Microfoundations

The paper argues that the microfoundations programme can be understood as an implementation of an underlying methodological principle, methodological individualism, and that it therefore shares a fundamental ambiguity with that principle, viz, whether the macro must be derived from and therefore reducible to, or rather consistent with micro-level behaviours. The pluralist conclusion of the paper is not that research guided by the principle of microfoundations is necessarily wrong, but that the exclusion of approaches not guided by that principle is indeed necessarily wrong. The argument is made via an examination of the advantages claimed for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the relationship between parts and wholes in social science, and the concepts of reduction, substrate neutrality, the intentional stance, and hypostatisation

Microfoundations

This paper argues that the microfoundations programme can be understood as an implementation of an underlying methodological principle—methodological individualism—and that it therefore shares a fundamental ambiguity with that principle, viz, whether the macro must be derived from and therefore reducible to, or rather consistent with, micro-level behaviours. The pluralist conclusion of the paper is not that research guided by the principle of microfoundations is necessarily wrong, but that the exclusion of approaches not guided by that principle is indeed necessarily wrong. The argument is made via an examination of the advantages claimed for dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the relationship between parts and wholes in social science, and the concepts of reduction, substrate neutrality, the intentional stance, and hypostatisation

Towards a New Political Economy of Behavioral Public Policy

The dominant normative framework in behavioral public policy postulates paternalistic intervention to increase individual utility, epitomized by the so-called nudge approach. In this article, an alternative political economy of behavioral public policy is proposed that sits within, or at least closely aside, the liberal economic tradition. In short, rather than impose utility maximization as the normative ideal, this framework proposes that policy makers provide an environment that is conducive to each person's own conception of a flourishing life, while at the same time regulating against behaviorally informed harms and for behaviorally induced, otherwise forgone, benefits

Magna Carta, the Rule of Law and the Limits on Government

This paper surveys the legal tradition that links Magna Carta with the modern concepts of the rule of law and the limits on government. It documents that the original understanding of the rule of law included substantive commitments to individual freedom and limited government. Then, it attempts at explaining how and why such commitments were lost to a formalist interpretation of the rule of law from 1848 to 1939. The paper concludes by arguing how a revival of the substantive commitments of the rule of law is central in a project of reshaping modern states