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This Article explores Knight's theory of the entrepreneurial function in the modern enterprise in two contexts. The first is Berle and Means's arguments, in which I offer a reconstruction of Knight that responds to the argument in The Modern Corporation regarding both the corporate separation of ownership and control, and the potential for industrial policy to promote the social interest. The second context I use to explore Knight's understanding of entrepreneurship is his later arguments regarding the problem of intelligent control in a democratic society. From the 1930s to the end of his life in the early 1970s, Knight increasingly focused on the nature of a free, democratic society and the attendant problems for a social science that wishes to inform democratic action. While it is convenient to divide his life's work into two parts—the first focused on economic theory (ending in the early 1940s) and the second on social philosophy—the two are connected by a conception of human and social action in the midst of uncertainty that runs from Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit to Knight's last book, Intelligence and Democratic Action.

The social sciences at the University of Chicago are renowned for their leadership in the development of empirical investigation in their respective disciplines. The postwar Chicago school of economics is only the best known of the efforts at that university to entrench specialized competencies in the faculty and students practicing a social scientific discipline. During the same period, the Committee on Social Thought emerged as an academic interdisciplinary unit in the humanities and social sciences. Ironically, the committee became the place in which one honed the competencies required for a particular type of interdisciplinarity.

Frank H. Knight's antagonism to religion is well known and features prominently in his writings from the 1930s on. But during the 1920s, when he was a professor at the University of Iowa and wrote some of his most important essays on the limitations of economics, Knight was an active participant in the Iowa City Unitarian Church. Drawing on research about his association with the Unitarian Church, and his unpublished writings from the period on religion, economics, and social organization, the essay argues that the Unitarian association provided a community open to discussing the multidimensionality of human experience, which assisted Knight in his investigation of ethics, economics, science, and liberal democracy. In the end, however, his association with the Unitarians ceased when he moved back to the University of Chicago in 1928.

Abstract.  The ferocity of Knight's comments on Henry George may come as a surprise to those who are not familiar with his criticisms of other economists and philosophers. But, in fact, his criticisms of George are not due to specifically Knightian insights on George's approach, but rather reflect the different philosophical framework from which neoclassical economists like Knight think. At the core of Knight's disagreements with George is his neoclassical theory of rent, as the Georgist critics of Knight understand. The article reviews the philosophical, economic, and ethical ideas that underlay Knight's neoclassicism, and hence inform his criticism of George.

Eleven years ago, at my first HES conference, I attended a session on the historiography of economics. In my naiveté and brashness (not a good combination!) as a grad student, I asked why so much of the conversation about how to do historical work in economics was dominated by reference to methodological categories provided by philosophers of science like Lakatos, Popper, and Kuhn. I enjoyed my own investigations in the philosophy of economics, and was starting to write about Frank Knight, who was certainly not naive philosophically, but I wanted a different reference point as ahistorianof economics. I remember one member of the panel looking at me somewhat puzzled and asking, "Where else would you look?"Today, we gather to reflect, once again, on the historiography of economics. This time, we are asked to reflect on a new reference point for our work: the sociology of scientific knowledge or science studies. Jan Golinski has provided us with an excellent survey of work in this field, and a synopsis of its relevance over the past fifteen years or so to the history of the natural sciences. His book is not a rallying cry for constructivism, but rather a careful analysis of the benefits and costs to historians of science if they choose to adopt constructivist techniques.