Essential Scholars

The origin of the Austrian School of economics is the publication of Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics in 1871. Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras are considered the co-founders of the “marginal revolution” in economics, a shift to...

David Hume (1711–1776) is a towering and intriguing figure. He was the preeminent philosopher in what is now called the Scottish Enlightenment, a time that was “crowded with genius” and in a place regarded as the rebirth of the golden era of Athens....

The political ideas that fully came together under the name “liberal” in the early nineteenth century—the ideas we often now refer to as “classical liberalism”—emerged out of major debates and developments from the late 1600s to the late 1700s, part...

Nobel laureate economist F.A.Hayek first revolutionized economists' understanding of markets, and then profoundly challenged the public's understanding of government. Hayek is one of only a few social scientists over the past 200 years who thoroughly...

James (“Jim”) McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), surely seemed an unlikely prospect for winning a Nobel Prize in Economics when he was born in rural Tennessee on October 3rd.Many of the works on Buchanan’s extensive list of publications stemmed from a...

No single individual is ever the sole founder of any major stance in political philosophy. Nevertheless, if one were forced to name the founder of the classical liberal perspective in political thought which holds as its primary political principle...

The oldest of nine children, John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806; he died in France, where he spent many of his later years, on May 7, 1873.Mill had a very extraordinary, strenuous education, overseen by his ambitious father James, who believed...

Joseph Schumpeter is one of the most accomplished economists of the twentieth century. Included among his many contributions is his path-breaking work on entrepreneurship—one of the quintessential characteristics of all market economies.His timeless...

When economists are called “influential,” it usually means they’ve changed the way other economists think. By that standard, Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of all time. He revolutionized the way economiststhink about...

Robert Nozick was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University who is most famous for his contributions to political philosophy. His 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia helped establish the classical liberal or libertarian perspective as a viable...

Ronald Coase (1910-2013) was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. His influence is due largely to two publications, the only two cited in the announcement of his Nobel Prize: “The Nature of the Firm” (1937) and “The Problem of...

The UCLA tradition carries on in the work of dozens of economists who earned their PhDs at UCLA during its golden years. Because their work spread beyond UCLA, the tradition lives on in the work of scores of economists who had no formal connection...

The thinkers discussed in this volume are a remarkably diverse group. They were born in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and their work extends into the twenty-first. Some are economists primarily addressing other scholars, others...