In an attempt to combat the positivist view that the only legitimate way to conduct social science is in the manner of a natural science, Knight distinguished between positivist and non-positivist categories or levels of interpretation of human-social subject matter. Since each of the categories contained ‘a large element of truth’, Knight argued that any serious analysis would need to embrace a pluralist approach. In this paper I draw on four separate accounts he gave (in 1934, 1940, 1941, and 1942) (...) of these categories in order to arrive at a more complete statement. This fuller description will hopefully promote a deeper appreciation of Knight's emphasis on the need for adopting a pluralist approach to the subject matter of economics. I then apply the perspective of the categories to shed light on Knight's definition of economics and his criticism of Robbins' definition. (shrink)

The idea of sustainability is an odd composite of imagination and accounting. Environmental history is a permissive historical subdiscipline, and this essay is about the environmental???economic???intellectual history of an environmental idea, sustainability, which is historical in the sense that it is very old, and historical, too, in the sense that it is an idea about history, or about imagining the future in relation to the past. One of the oddities of the last several decades is that these old ideas have (...) been transformed into the most celebrated of all the dicta of environmental policy, or an aspiration of UN commissions, ???strategy consultancies???, and very large government agencies. (shrink)

The encounter of environmental history and intellectual history is a union of two insidiously oceanic inquiries.???Oceanic??? in the sense of limitlessness, or oneness with the universe.???All history is the history of thought???, and the history of thought is in modern intellectual history a universal investigation, of advertisements for sofas and Ayn Rand and adoption laws in early colonial Bihar. But all history is also the history of space, and of the environment that surrounds the sofas and the laws. It is (...) apparent, now, that???history occurs in space as well as time???. Environmental history is everywhere as well as nowhere. It is a new universal understanding, which subverts even the historians' own anxieties about universalization: a???negative universal history???. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.