References to my thought: Edimburgh period

Percy C. Acuña Vigil

In my blog Polis- Civitas I posted a paper where it is accounted those who were main initial references during my studies in Edinburgh. These references marked my path and were the melting pot that through urban planning, architecture and epistemological positioning allowed me to establish the basis for the construction of my thoughts. I report here basically my references in Economy and Philosophy from the Edinburgh period.:

Fundamentos en mis estudios iniciales:

Jeremy Bentham.  (London, 1748—1832)

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical. He is primarily known today for his moral philosophy, especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their consequences. The relevant consequences, in particular, are the overall happiness created for everyone affected by the action. Influenced by many enlightenment thinkers, especially empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, Bentham developed an ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of human nature. He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain.

Although he never practiced law, Bentham did write a great deal of philosophy of law, spending most of his life critiquing the existing law and strongly advocating legal reform. Throughout his work, he critiques various natural accounts of law which claim, for example, that liberty, rights, and so on exist independent of government. In this way, Bentham arguably developed an early form of what is now often called “legal positivism.” Beyond such critiques, he ultimately maintained that putting his moral theory into consistent practice would yield results in legal theory by providing justification for social, political, and legal institutions.

Bentham’s influence was minor during his life. But his impact was greater in later years as his ideas were carried on by followers such as John Stuart Mill, John Austin, and other consequentialists.

See concepts about Economy in this blog.

 Reference for his Philosophy
The standard edition of Bentham’s writings is: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, (ed. John Bowring), London, 1838-1843; Reprinted New York, 1962.
Stanford Enciclopedia of Philosophy


David Ricardo. (London, 1772 - 1823)

David Ricardo (1772 –1823) was a British political economist and stock trader. He was often credited with systematizing economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator, who amassed a considerable personal fortune. Perhaps his most important contribution was the theory of comparative advantage, a fundamental argument in favour of free trade among countries and of specialisation among individuals. Ricardo argued that there is mutual benefit from trade (or exchange) even if one party (e.g. resource-rich country, highly skilled artisan) is more productive in every possible area than its trading counterpart (e.g. resource-poor country, unskilled labourer), as long as each concentrates on the activities where it has a relative productivity advantage.

Reference 1
Reference 2
See in this blog a reference to his concepts.

John Stuart Mill.  (London, 1806,  1873, )

English philosopher, economist, and exponent of Utilitarianism. He was prominent as a publicist in the reforming age of the 19th century, and remains of lasting interest as a logician and an ethical theorist.

John Stuart Mill is a clear example of why from Lytton Strachey called "eminent Victorians", ie that kind of people who in the 19th century combined with unalloyed individualism no less profound conviction that being part a cultural elite gave them not only rights but was a source of obligations and social charges.

Reference 1

Reference 2
Stanford Enciclopedia of Philosophy
Encyclopaedia Britannica

Richard A. Posner. (New York city, 1939-)

Is an American jurist, legal theorist, economist and is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is an influential figure on the topic of law and economics.

He is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice, The Problems of Jurisprudence, Sex and Reason, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy.

The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century.

See in this blog a reference of his concepts
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference to the Blue book, the oficial reference manual for citations in the USA legal system.:

Trough the works of Posner I became aquainted with North American Philosophy:


David Director Friedman (1945)

Is an economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist. He is known for his writings in market anarchist theory, which is the subject of his most popular book, The Machinery of Freedom (1973, revised 1989).

He has authored several other books and articles, including Price Theory: An Intermediate Text (1986), Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do with Law and Why It Matters (2000), Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life (1996), and Future Imperfect (2008).

Reference

Murray Newton Rothbard (New York, 1926 - 1995)

Murray Newton Rothbard (/1926 –1995) was an American economist of the Austrian School as well as an historian, philosopher and political theorist. His writings and personal influence helped create modern libertarianism and he was a central figure in it. He wrote over twenty books.

Rothbard was a leading influence on the development of anarcho-capitalism. In the words of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, "There would be no anarcho-capitalist movement to speak of without Rothbard."  He wrote that the state is "the organization of robbery systematized and writ large" and the locus of unscrupulous individuals.

Rothbard asserted that all services provided by what he called the "monopoly system of the corporate state" could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics.

Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3

Gary Stanley Becker. (Pennsylvania, 1930)

Is an American economist. He is a professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and a professor at the Booth School of Business. He has important contributions to the family economics branch within the economics. Neoclassical analysis of family within the family economics is also called new home economics. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and received the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007.[1] He is currently a Rose-Marie and Jack R. Anderson senior fellow at the conservative[2] Hoover Institution, located at Stanford University.

Becker was one of the first economists to branch into what were traditionally considered topics belonging to sociology, including racial discrimination, crime, family organization, and drug addiction (see rational addiction). He is known for arguing that many different types of human behavior can be seen as rational and utility maximizing. His approach can include altruistic behavior by defining individuals' utility appropriately. He is also among the foremost exponents of the study of human capital. Becker is also credited with the "rotten kid theorem."

Reference posted in wikipedia
Reference to the Becker & Posner blog

Ronald Harry Coase (London, 1910)

Is a British-born, America-based economist and the Clifton R. Musser Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School. After studying with the University of London External Programme in 1927–29, Coase entered the London School of Economics, where he took courses with Arnold Plant.[1] He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1991.

Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms, and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). Coase is also often referred to as the "father" of reform in the policy for allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, based on his article "The Federal Communications Commission" (1959), where he criticizes spectrum licensing, suggesting property rights as a more efficient method of allocating spectrum to users. Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics.

Reference 1:
Reference 2 The Nature of the Firm.
Reference 3: The problem of Social cost.


Theodore William Schultz. (Arlington, 1902 –1998)

Was the 1979 winner (jointly with William Arthur Lewis) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

He taught at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943,[2] and served as the chair of economics at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1961. He became president of the American Economic Association in 1960.

Reference
See in this blog a reference to his concepts.

Adam Smith
Aynd Rand
Carl Menger
David Friedman
David Hume
David Ricardo
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk
Friedrig Hayeck
Gary Becker
Jerome Bentham
John Stuart Mill
Ludwig von Mieses
Milton Friedman
Murray Rotband
Paul Samuelsson
Richard Posner
Ronald Coase
Theodore Schulz