Economic theory in retrospect

The first edition of this book appeared in 1962, by which time the history of economic thought had virtually disappeared as a teaching subject in British and American universities. In a perceptive article published in that year, entitled 'What Price the History of Economic Thought?', Donald Winch explained why most economists knew little and cared even less about the history of their own discipline: owing to recent developments in modern economics, economists had increasingly come to feel that at long last they were beginning to provide new answers to new problems, or, at any rate, better answers to old problems; such a confident state of mind naturally tends to discourage an interest in predecessors and forerunners. The complacency of the 1960s, however, has given way to the nail-biting of the 1970s. There is nowadays a pervasive and repeatedly expressed sense of 'crisis' in economics. In part this reflects the failure to come to grips with such outstanding contemporary economic problems as stagflation, pollution, and sex and race discrimination in labor markets. This failure to tackle the major economic problems of the day has in turn given rise to such alternative economic doctrines as radical political economy, neo-Marxian economics, and post-Keynesian economics, all of which purport to throw light on these unsolved problems, in the course of which they first criticize and then reject mainstream modern economics. If there is anything to the Winch thesis, we may expect that the current anxiety about the state of modern economics will bring about alrevival of interest in the history of economic thought. And, indeed, it is possible to discern definite signs of such a renaissance in the flood of articles and books that have appeared on the history of economics in the last few years, not to mention the reappearance of history-of-thought courses in economics departments around the world.