History of economic thought

Interest in the development of economic science is little more than a hundred years old. There are a few unimportant works in the eighteenth century and there is a book in the Wealth of Nations which surveys earlier systems of political economy. But when Adam Smith wrote, the theories which he considered erroneous had not been completely ousted and his survey had a critical aim. We have to wait until the supremacy of classical economy is being challenged before interest in earlier thought revives. Indeed, the earliest attempts at a systematic treatment of the history of economic doctrine were made by adherents of the historical and socialist schools which developed in Germany after the middle of the nineteenth century. Those who, like Roscher, were anxious to develop the historical approach in competition with the deductive were naturally preoccupied with the history of ideas. Socialists, on the other hand, hoped to draw inspiration in their fight against the prevailing liberal-capitalist theory from a critical study of the origins of that theory. Both the muddle headed Dühring (who earns surprising commendation from Professor Schumpeter) and Marx, in his monumental Theorien über den Mehrwert, tried to supply this critical review.