Abstract
It might surprise much people, including economists, if one states that economics has progressively but with a striking certainty turned into a formal science, axiomatized, that has not much to do with the political economy of its origins, that of David Hume or Adam Smith, and the other Scottish thinkers of the end of the eighteenth century. This is what James Buchanan already noted in 1958, when he and G. Warren Nutter decided to launch the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Political Economy.
The original version of this chapter was revised: For detailed information please see erratum. The erratum to this chapter is available at DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47471-7_13
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Notes
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See the journal disclaimer at http://www.springer.com/economics/law+%26+economics/journal/10657.
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It was precisely Becker’s claim that economists would only need “thin” or “parsimonious” theoretical constructs, by contrast with sociologists, for instance, who need “thick” theories (on the distinction between “thin/parsimonious” and “thick” see Boettke and Coyne 2005; Boettke et al. 2006). And the advantages of an economic approach to crime is that it does not require a complex and detailed theoretical apparatus to explain phenomena.
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Let us note here that the importance of these European scholars had for Backhaus is another evidence that law and economics is a European field. Besides Coase or Calabresi, or Bentham and Beccaria (see Ramello 2016), there were also all the German scholars to whom Backhaus devoted a lot of work (see Sect. 4 below).
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Josselin, JM., Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (2016). The Law, The Economy, The Polity Jürgen Backhaus, A Thinker Outside the Box. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G. (eds) Law and Economics in Europe and the U.S.. The European Heritage in Economics and the Social Sciences, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47471-7_1
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