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.

Contents

List of tables

Preface and acknowledgments

Detailed Contents for Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical School

Introduction

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 capital

2 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 Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth [Recherches sur les principes mathématiques de la théorie des richesses]

Rudolf Auspitz and Richard Lieben: An Inquiry into Price Theory [Untersuchungen über die Theorie des Preises]

4 Institutionalism

Gustav von Schmoller as theoretician

In between Historical School and modern Institutionalism: J. R. Commons‘s Institutionalism

Johan Åkerman’s The Problem of a Socio-Economic Synthesis [Das Problem der sozialökonomischen Synthese]

Alexander W. Chayanov’s The Theory of Peasant Economy

5 Moderns

Knut Wicksell’s Interest and Prices [Geldzins und Güterpreise]

Heinrich von Stackelberg’s concept of equilibrium: the search for evolutionarily stable market behaviour

Paul A. Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis

John R. Hicks’s Value and Capital

Alfred Müller-Armack’s path: from interventionary state to the social market economy

Market, policy, and society in Wilhelm Röpke

Appendix: The Series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie

References

Index