Essays in economics : the International Monetary Fund - history, institutional and legal structures, ethics, epistemology, International Law and the International Monetary Fund and Charles Davenant and the Great Recoinage of 1696

Abstract

This work is an exploration of the epistemology of economics which aims to analyse some of the wider teleological and ontological questions that arise from that investigation. This exploration is facilitated by the focus of this thesis at first on the history of economic thought during the Financial Revolution of the late 17th Century and the historical, institutional and legal analysis of the International Monetary Fund. The methods utilized in this work are similar those used in legal reasoning and for the critical analysis of primary and secondary source documents by historians. In a word, the method is interdisciplinary. This work attempts to grapple with the implications of not only the method but also the teleological, ontological and epistemological question presented by the application of that method. The lens through which those ideas are viewed is natural law. Natural Law Theory can justifiably be considered the seed from which modem economics has sprung. It also informs and in some cases acts as full or partial basis of ideas during the 17th Century. In modem times, human rights law and intemational law owe much of their existence to the interpretation of natural law and "law of peoples" tradition that originates in the Roman legal tradition and its antecedents.