An Epistemological Analysis of the Economic Writings of Sir Dudley North

The existing secondary literature on the life and writings of Sir Dudley North is scant and incomplete, and contains substantial factual errors. In this dissertation, North's complete economic principles are reconstructed from primary sources; North invented a price mechanics of markets, a specie-flow mechanics, and a national income mechanics. The epistemological device of the conceptualized reality is used to analyze the sources of North's economic principles; his economics is decomposed into its constituent parts of historical and empirical fact matrix, and hypothetical and theoretical belief system. North's failure to establish a paradigm is explained, in terms of political considerations