From Economics to Social Philosophy
Although philosophical themes run all the way back in Knight’s work to his days as a philosophy graduate student at Cornell in 1913, his remarks about the state of liberal society in the 1930s gained him a reputation for pugnacious realism (Knight 1947: 19-34, 370-402; 1991), and by the 1940s the majority of his work concerns three themes in social philosophy.
The first was the historical origins of the Liberal Revolution, especially the history of the epistemological break of scientific thinking from organized religion and its implications for social science (Knight and Merriam 1945). The second was the political autonomy of democratic deliberation from the threat of social control in either the name of moralism or scientism. The third was the need for a social scientific approach to intelligent social action grounded in the principles of economics, but incorporating as well an understanding of democratic politics and an affirmation of the independence of ethical judgements. From the end of World War II until his death in 1972, he lectured, wrote and revised on the threefold nature of democratic social philosophy - economics, politics and ethics. That work, along with his earlier economic theorizing, is his legacy.Ross B. Emmett
See also:
British classical political economy (II); Chicago School (II); German and Austrian schools (II); Institutionalism (II).