History of economics: the past as the present
- London Hamish Hamilton 1987
- 324 p.
Economics as now taught and read and as it serves to guide both public policy and private decision is very much the product of the past. It cannot be understood apart from its history. And that history cannot be understood apart from the circumstances that shaped the economic beliefs of the time, including the powerful influences that bent those beliefs to what best. served their financial advantage of those who espoused them. Such is the essence of this important, intensely interesting, and highly functional book. Nothing quite like it has ever been attempted before. The history of economic ideas has often been written. This book puts those ideas securely in the life of their times and it tells especially of those ideas that have survived to influence our present
beliefs and action. Here are the ethical judgments that remain from the household and slave economies of the Greeks, from biblical thought and from the feudal world of St. Thomas Aquinas, from the pre-revolutionary French philosophers in defence of agriculture, and from the merchant capitalists in the infant days of modern capitalism. There is Adam Smith, viewing the beginning stages of modern industrial life, and Marx reacting to the cruelties of nineteenth-century capitalism. The book continues to Keynes, the Great Depression, and the modern welfare state.