Books in the Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics series

An account and technical assessment of Marx's economic analysis in Capital and other documents, with particular reference to the transformation and the surplus-value doctrine, the reproduction schemes, the falling real-wage and profit rates, and the trade cycle.

"This book is a collective biography of the only generation of economists who lived their entire professional life in GDR's socialism. Born in the early 1930s, formed during the Thaw, having careers behind the wall, and retiring with their state in 1990, they were GDR's hope generation"--

In popular imagery, Herbert Hoover is often stereotyped as a 'do-nothing' president who offered only nineteenth-century slogans for the greatest economic catastrophe in twentieth-century American history. Nothing could be further from the truth. This study examines the properties of an innovative approach to economic growth and stability formulated by Hoover and his associates during his years as secretary of commerce (1921-9) and inspects his deployment of this strategy from the White House following the Great Crash in the autumn of 1929. Attention is then focused on Hoover's attempts to reformulate his macro-economic programme as the depression deepened in late 1931 and 1932. Archival materials provide arresting insights into Hoover's aspirations for a new institution - the Reconstruction Finance Corporations - as a vehicle for stimulating investment through a novel form of 'off-budget' financing. To complement the discussion of Hoover's theories of economic policy in their various manifestations, the views of contemporary economists on problems of the day are surveyed.

This is the first biographical treatment of Jan Tinbergen, the first Nobel Prize Winner in Economics. It analyzes his youthful socialist ideals and involvement in Plan-socialism and how it gave rise to his pioneering econometric models and his seminal theory of economic policy. It situates his work within the rise of modern economic expertise.

Using the empirical Cobb-Douglas production function as case study, the general phenomenon of the diffusion of new research tools in economics is addressed, and the intersection of this history with that of several important empirical research programs will appeal to historians of twentieth century economics and other social sciences.

This book argues that the work of the Austrian economists, including Carl Menger, Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, has been narrowly interpreted. Through a study of Viennese politics and culture, it is demonstrated that the project they were engaged in was much broader: the study of civilization.

The book discusses the theories, theorists, and contexts from which behavioral economics arose and shows how this new field in economics subsequently developed. The central theme running through the book is that behavioral economics reflects and contributes to a fundamental reorientation of the foundations upon which economics was based for nearly two hundred years.

This book perceives Engels' early contribution to Marxian economic analysis. It justifies his defence of Marx against charges of plagiarism; rationalizes his objection that the 'utopian' socialists ignored the price mechanism; and analyzes his so-called revisionism in the light of constitutional and welfare reform.

This book provides a comprehensive survey of the major developments in monetary theory and policy from David Hume and Adam Smith to Walter Bagehot and Knut Wicksell. In particular, it seeks to explain why it took so long for a theory of central banking to penetrate mainstream thought.

This book describes the contribution of David Ricardo, one of the most influential economists of the nineteenth century, to the development of macroeconomics. It provides a detailed history of economic conditions in the early nineteenth century, showing that Ricardo was well versed in the affairs of the time.

Harry Johnson (1923-1977) was such a striking figure in economics that Nobel Laureate James Tobin designated the third quarter of the twentieth century as 'the age of Johnson'. This book chronicles his intellectual development and his contributions to economics, economic education, and the discussion of economic policy.

This book studies the development of ideas on freedom, coercion and power in the history of economic thought. It focuses on the exchange of goods and services and on terms of exchange (interest rates, prices and wages) and examines the nature of choice, that is, the state of the will of economic actors making exchange decisions.

This book is a comprehensive investigation of the work of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950), one of the great economists of the twentieth century. Yuichi Shionoya aims at elucidating the total picture of his thought as well as his unique way of thinking.

This 1996 work examines the history of debates between Friedman and his critics over money's causal role in business cycles from 1948 to 1991.

This book examines and compares the 'old' institutionalism of Veblen, Mitchell, Commons, and Ayres, with the 'new' institutionalism developed from neoclassical and Austrian sources.

This book covers a broad range of topics in the history of economics that have relevance to economic theories. The author believes that one of the tasks for a historian of economics is to analyze and interpret theories currently outside the mainstream of economic theory, in this case non-Walrasian economics.

This is a history of international monetary thought from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It provides a comprehensive survey of the literature produced on international macroeconomics for that period. Professor Flanders argues that progress in the field of international monetary economics (or in the discipline as a whole) has not been linear.

The Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons (1835-82) is generally and rightly venerated as one of the great innovators of economic theory and method. This book is an investigation into the cultural and intellectual resources that Jevons drew upon to revolutionize research methods in economics.

Laidler surveys the writings of a large number of economists in the inter-war years and argues that the 'Keynesian Revolution' is a myth, and that the 'new economics' was a careful and selective synthesis of an 'old economics' which had been developing for twenty years or more.

This work analyzes the centrality of law in nineteenth century historical and institutional economics and serves as a prehistory to the new institutional economics of the late twentieth century.

This 1988 book presents a historical investigation of the theoretical development of contemporary Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT). The author examines the central features of the EBCT by tracing both the history of business cycle theory and the history of econometrics.

Professor Sent offers an innovative type of analysis of the recent history of rational expectations economics. In the course of exploring the multiple dimensions of rational expectations analysis, the author focuses on the work of Thomas Sargent, an instrumental pioneer in the development of this school of thought.

This 1994 book examines the development of the ideas of the new Austrian school from its beginnings in the 1870s to the present. It focuses primarily in showing how the coherent theme that emerges from the thought of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Lachman, Israel Kirzner and others is an examination of the implications of time and ignorance for economic theory.

Franklin D. Roosevelt drew heavily on the thinking of economists as he sought to combat the Great Depression, to mobilize the American economy for war, and to chart a new order for the post-war world. This 1996 book explains how divergent analytic perspectives competed for official favour and the manner in which Roosevelt opted to pick and choose among them when formulating economic policies.

This book tells the extraordinary story of the Pinochet regime's economists, known as the Chicago Boys. Following their training as economists at the University of Chicago, they took advantage of Pinochet's 1973 military coup to launch the first radical free market strategy implemented in a developing country.

This book deals with the institutionalist movement in American economics, a movement that was a significant part of American economics in the interwar period. This movement emphasized the importance of institutions, an empirical approach and the need for new forms of 'social control'.

This book tells the story of the search for disequilibrium micro-foundations for macroeconomic theory, from the disequilibrium theories of Patinkin, Clower and Leijonhufvud to recent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with imperfect competition. Placing this search against the background of wider developments in macroeconomics, the authors contend that this was never a single research program, but involved economists with very different aims who developed the basic ideas about quantity constraints, spillover effects and coordination failures in different ways. The authors contrast this with the equilibrium, market-clearing approach of Phelps and Lucas, arguing that equilibrium theories simply assumed away the problems that had motivated the disequilibrium literature. Although market-clearing models came to dominate macroeconomics, disequilibrium theories never went away and continue to exert an important influence on the subject. Although this book focuses on one strand in modern macroeconomics, it is crucial to understanding the origins of modern macroeconomic theory.

More Heat Than Light is a history of how physics has drawn some inspiration from economics and also how economics has sought to emulate physics, especially with regard to the theory of value. It traces the development of the energy concept in Western physics and its subsequent effect upon the invention and promulgation of neoclassical economics. Any discussion of the standing of economics as a science must include the historical symbiosis between the two disciplines. Starting with the philosopher Emile Meyerson's discussion of the relationship between notions of invariance and causality in the history of science, the book surveys the history of conservation principles in the Western discussion of motion. Recourse to the metaphors of the economy are frequent in physics, and the concepts of value, motion, and body reinforced each other throughout the development of both disciplines, especially with regard to practices of mathematical formalisation. However, in economics subsequent misuse of conservation principles led to serious blunders in the mathematical formalisation of economic theory. The book attempts to provide the reader with sufficient background in the history of physics in order to appreciate its theses. The discussion is technically detailed and complex, and familiarity with calculus is required.

This book provides a contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall's thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall's thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, which saw him supplementing Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel's Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall's early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging reinterpretation of political economy as a whole. The book concludes with the suggestion that Marshall's mature economic science was conceived by him as but one part of a wider, neo-Hegelian, social philosophy.

Drawing on a wealth of archival material, including personal correspondence and diaries, Robert Leonard tells the fascinating story of the creation of game theory by Hungarian Jewish mathematician John von Neumann and Austrian economist Oskar Morgenstern. Game theory first emerged amid discussions of the psychology and mathematics of chess in Germany and fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungary. In the 1930s, on the cusp of anti-Semitism and political upheaval, it was developed by von Neumann into an ambitious theory of social organization. It was shaped still further by its use in combat analysis in World War II and during the Cold War. Interweaving accounts of the period's economics, science, and mathematics, and drawing sensitively on the private lives of von Neumann and Morgenstern, Robert Leonard provides a detailed reconstruction of a complex historical drama.