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RR 2004/127 A Companion to the History of Economic Thought Edited by Warren J. Samuels, Jeff E. Biddle and John B. Davis Blackwell Oxford and Malden, MA 2003 xvii+712 pp. ISBN 0 631 22573 0 £99.99/$134.95 Blackwell Companions to Contemporary Economics
Keywords Economics, Economic history, Economic theory
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120410528036
When you combine economics and the history of ideas, you get a story. It is not a naïve story, showing growing sophistication or "progress", but one which reveals a perennial interest in markets and labour, capital and money, in a variety of political and cultural settings. It is also a story which, while it can be made to seem coherent (and this Companion certainly does that), demonstrates changing paradigms, reversions, orthodoxies and departures, in ways Kuhn speaks about science. The contributors to this book, which is the third in a series on contemporary economics (the two others are theoretical econometrics and economic forecasting), define their work as a story. You come away from it with wide knowledge of economic thought from earlier times (for example, Aristotle's Politics, Roman notions of monetary exchange, mercantilism and the Physiocrats), up through the "classical" economics of Adam Smith's political economy into general equilibrium theory and neoclassical economics, to Keynes, post-Keynesianism, monetarism and radical economy (and anti-capitalist) ideologies of the present day. So the "story" of economic thought is clear to see and, for a serious academic collection supporting economic history and the history of ideas, this work will be on the desiderata list, despite its price.
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