About Us

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Via Egnatia is a blog about Christianity, philosophy, and social science.  The contributors are all practicing Christians.  Some are Eastern Orthodox, and others Roman Catholic.  Hence the name: the Via Egnatia was an important Roman road, constructed during the 2nd century BC, which eventually linked the cities of Rome and Constantinople.

Contributors

Alexander William Salter is an economics professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, and the Comparative Economics Research Fellow at TTU's Free Market Institute.  He is a parishioner of St. Andrew Greek Orthodox Church in Lubbock, TX.

Christopher Fleming is a doctoral candidate from New Orleans, LA. He currently resides in Fairfax, VA and is a parishioner of St. James Catholic Church in Falls Church, VA.




Popular posts from this blog

Liberal Economics?

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Economics is a liberal discipline.  This is my argument, expressed as concisely as possible.  I do not have in mind political or social liberalism.  The historical connections between economics and the various European liberalisms have been well-established by intellectual historians.  Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , published in 1776, was a watershed moment for economics and liberalism.  The rise of Manchesterism, with its advocacy of free markets both domestically and abroad, was another.  Similar examples exist for France, Italy, and Germany, even if they proved less definitive than in England and Scotland.  This is neither new nor controversial.  Instead, my interest is the relationship between economics and a liberal outlook, or worldview—and, as an essentially related matter, a liberal education.  Although it is seldom appreciated, economics is liberal in this sense, too.  At first glance...
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"Nothing Human is Alien to Me": The Liberality of Rational Choice

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What makes economics a liberal discipline?   It is time to tackle this question head-on.   As it turns out, what many detractors of economics point to as evidencing its illiberality is actually the key to its liberality.   I am speaking about the rationality postulate : the fundamental assumption economics makes with respect to human behavior, and how it can be made intelligible. First, we need to make clear what rationality is not .   Rationality does not mean that people never make mistakes.   And it does not mean they are “lightning calculators of pleasure and pain.”   These careless accusations are strawmen.   Admittedly, economists bear some of the blame for this misunderstanding.   Graduate textbooks of microeconomic theory present a set of conditions for rationality that are as unlikely to obtain as they are irrelevant to human decision-making. Rationality is actually very simple.   When economics assumes people are rational, it i...
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Romancing the Economist

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My previous contributions to this blog were about the possibility of the institutional aspects of academic economics being liberal. But there is more to philosophy, politics, and economics than liberalism. Now, I want to ask if academic economics is romantic. I want to begin this reflection with what seems to me to be an obvious observation: contemporary society has given romanticism a bad name. The diminishment of the term has come with its association with foolhardy love stories whose protagonists have lost the ability to think critically in the presence of their paramours. However, romance means much more than what we may find on the Hallmark Channel (even if its ultimate expression may indeed be a Christmas miracle).   An unsatisfactory description of Romanticism is that it was a movement that emerged in the 19 th century as a reaction to the perceived reductionism associated with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The Romantics sensed that Enlightenment rati...
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