Great Economic Thinkers from the Classicals to the Moderns

Bertram Schefold is Senior Professor at the Department of Economics, Goethe-Universität, Germany. He has published more than 40 books and 250 articles on economic theory, history of economic thought, energy policy and general economic policy. He edited the series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie.

Schefold invites the reader to understand the history of economic thought not as a discipline which primarily wants to discover the earliest author to have expressed a thought which might still be important today. "The texts are really interesting only if we recognise a ‘political’ dimension and try to interpret them as expressions of the will to shape, to preserve or to change the world", he writes. Schefold [...] tries to build a bridge from the traditional history of economic theories to a universal history of economic thought.- Gerald Braunberger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)"...this is a truly great achievement in the history of economic thought; it is comparable to that of Schumpeter’s when he wrote the History of Economic Analysis in the middle of the previous century."- Kiichiro Yagi, Setsunan University, Neyagawa city, Osaka, Japan

• ContentsList of tables Preface and acknowledgments Detailed Contents for Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical SchoolIntroduction Two schemes for ordering approaches to the history of economic thought Institutionalism and ordoliberalism The development of economic theory since Adam Smith: an ordering according to the theories of value and distribution 1 Classicals John Locke: a philosopher dedicated to economic thought The Pamphlets from 1815: a shining moment for economic theory Sismondi’s Nouveaux Principes d’Economie Politique: classical liberalism, philanthropy, and the experience of history Charles Babbage’s On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures Karl Marx: the significance of the problem of the theory of the forms of value and the transformation of values into prices for capital Karl Marx: circulation, productivity, and fixed capital2 Monetary Theory Thomas Tooke’s An Inquiry into the Currency Principle and the theory of distribution Walter Bagehot: political economist and publicist in the Victorian era Rudolf Hilferding and the idea of an organised capitalism 3 Neoclassicals William Stanley Jevons: the path to modern Utilitarianism Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s Mathematical Psychics Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk: discovery and error in the history of theories of interest Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s Positive Theory of Capital Irving Fisher’s The Nature of Capital and Income Irving Fisher’s determination of interest and long-term equilibrium Vilfredo Pareto’s Manual of Political Economy [Manuale di economia politica] Increasing returns, competition, and growth Antoine Augustin Cournot’s An Inquiry into the Ma