This highly original work offers an intellectual history of four central theories underlying the market economic system, focusing on their conception, evolution, and applications. Four Central Theories of the Market Economy traces the root of the theories, their conception and articulation, as well as their evolutions to the present time. It focuses on the four theories that are generally recognized as fundamental to the discipline of economics: the invisible hand, comparative advantage, the law of markets, and the quantity theory of money. These theories have profoundly influenced the world. Chapters explore their rich intellectual history from classical Greece to today, drawing on the original works of the great economic minds of the classical era and other thinkers who prepared the path for them, as well as those who refined their works or challenged them. This volume will leave the reader with a deep understanding of these pillars of the market economic system in the context of their historical development. This book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of economics who are interested in the intellectual history of their discipline as well as scholars and students of intellectual history who are interested in economics.

Firms are a ubiquitous feature of the economic landscape, with much of the activity undertaken within an economy taking place within their boundaries. Given the size of the contribution made by firms to economic activity, employment and growth, having a theoretical understanding of the nature and structure of firms is crucial for understanding how an economy functions. The Theory of the Firm firstly offers a brief overview of the past, consisting of a concise discussion of the classical view of production, followed by an outline of the development of the neoclassical - or ‘textbook’ - approach to firm level production. Secondly, the ‘present’ of the theory of the firm is discussed in three sections. The first section considers the post-1970 theory of the firm literature per se, while the second section scrutinises the relationship between the three most prominent of the modern sets of theories: the reference point, property rights and transaction cost approaches. The third section looks at the theory of privatisation. The unique aspects of this book includes its discussions of the post-1970 contributions to the theory of the firm; the integration of the theory of the entrepreneur with the theory of the firm; and the theory of privatisation. This volume offers an intuitive introduction to the theories of the firm as well as simple formal models of the most important contributions to the literature. It also outlines the historical evolution of the traditional and modern theories of the firm. This book is of great interest to those who study history of economic thought, industrial economics and organizational studies.

Speculative Fictions places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature. By studying Hamilton as an economic and imaginative writer, it argues that we can recast the conflict with the Jeffersonians as a literary debate about the best way to explain and describe modern capitalism, and explores how various other literary forms allow us to comprehend the complexities of a modern global economy in entirely new ways. Speculative Fictions identifies two overlooked literary genres of the late eighteenth-century as exemplary of this narrative mode. It asks that we read periodical essays and Black Atlantic captivity narratives with an eye not towards bourgeois subject formation, but as descriptive analyses of economic systems. In doing so, we discover how these two literary genres offer very different portraits of a global economy than that rendered by the novel, the imaginative genre we are most likely to associate with modern capitalism. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for the speculative, digressive, and unsystematic plotlines of these earlier narratives has the capacity to generate new imaginative projects with which to make sense of our increasingly difficult economic world.

This is the opus magnum of one of the world’s most renowned experts on the history of economic thought, Bertram Schefold. It contains commentaries from the series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie (Classics of Economics), which have been translated into English for the first time. Schefold’s choices of authors for this series, which he has edited since 1991, and his comments on the various re-edited works, are proof of his highly original and thought-provoking interpretation of the history of economic thought. Together with a companion volume, Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical School: Translations from the series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie, this book is a collection of English translations with introductions by Bertram Schefold. The emphasis of this volume is on the theoretical debates, from the theory of value to imperfect completion; from money to the institutional framework of society; and from the history of economic thought to pioneering works in mathematical economics. This volume is an important contribution to the history of economic thought, not only because it delivers original and fresh insights about well-known figures, such as Marx, Stackelberg, Sraffa, Samuelson, Tooke, Hilferding, Schmoller and Chayanov, but also because it deals with ideas and authors who have been forgotten or neglected in previous literature. This volume is of great interest to those who study the history of economic thought, economic theory and philosophy, as well as those who enjoyed the author’s previous volume, Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical School.

A.1.3 The anthropological background: The individual and the collective -- A.2 Excursus -- A.3 Value judgments, economics, philosophy -- A.3.1 The issue of value judgments -- A.3.2 Economics, philosophy and the whole man -- Bibliography -- Index.

David Ricardo’s theories were introduced in fragments in Japan after the Meiji restoration of 1868 and his work came into prominence late in comparison to other major thinkers figuring in the history of economic thought. The book seeks to analyse the studies in Japan from the year 1920 to the end of the 1930s – during the time before the outbreak of the Second World War, when even the study of classical economics became difficult. The book covers different aspects of his works and contains elements which may be interesting to foreign and even Japanese readers today without necessarily coming under the influence of Marx’s reading. It presents works on Ricardo that are at present, wholly unknown to the Ricardo scholars and more generally to the historians of economic thought outside Japan. This book is an essential read on the history of economic thought in Japan.

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) was one of the first great economists to have laid down the foundations of economic science. Author of the famous Treatise on Political Economy in 1803, which was revised and re-edited on several occasions, he published numerous other works including a voluminous Complete Course in Practical Political Economy in 1828–9. He also taught political economy successively from 1815 until his death in three Parisian establishments: the Athénée, the Conservatory of Arts and Trades, and the Collège de France. The texts in which Say exposes his approach to political economy have not been available in the English language until now except for the fourth edition of the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ which serves as an introduction to the Treatise. This book presents a translation which renders his works accessible to the English speaking world. For the first time, English readers will be able to become directly immersed in Say’s principal texts, where he develops his conception of political economy. Jean-Baptiste Say and Political Economy proposes a translation of a selection of eleven of Say’s texts. The first three are versions of the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ from the Treatise’s editions of 1803, 1814 and 1826 with the variations of the editions of 1817, 1819 and 1841. The following four texts are the opening discourses pronounced at the Conservatory in 1820 and 1828 and the Collège de France in 1831 and 1832. The eighth text is the ‘General Considerations’ which open the Complete Course in Practical Political Economy of 1828, with the variations of the 1840 re-edition. The final three texts are those Say devotes to ‘the progress of political economy’ in what is akin to a history of economic thought. This volume is of great importance to economic historians and people studying Jean-Baptiste Say, as well as those who are interested in economic theory and philosophy and political economy.

Although historians usually trace its origins to the Haitian Revolution of the late 18th Century, Latin American political, economic and cultural emancipation is still very much a work in progress. As new national identities were developed, fresh reflection and theorising was needed in order to understand how Latin America related to the wider world. Through a series of case studies on different topics and national experiences, this volume shows how political economy has occupied an important place in discussions about emancipation and independence that occurred in the region. The production of political economic knowledge in the periphery of capitalism can take on many forms: importing ideas from abroad; translating and adapting them to local realities; or else producing concepts and theories specifically designed to make sense of the uniqueness of particular historical experiences. The Political Economy of Latin American Independence illustrates each of these strategies, exploring issues such as trade policy, money and banking, socio-economic philosophy, nationalism, and economic development. The expert authors stress how the originality of Latin American economic thought often resides in the creative appropriation of ideas originally devised in different contexts and thus usually ill-suited to local realities. Taken together, the chapters illustrate a fertile methodological approach for studying the history of political economy in Latin America. This book is of great interest to economic historians specialising in Latin America, as well as those who study history of economic thought, political economy and Latin American history.

The Enlightenment was a time of monetary turmoil and transformation in Europe. Change began with a riot of experimentation, including novel ideas about human agency and capacity to promote economic progress, efforts to reframe divinity in terms (like the providential) compatible with market exchange, new instruments of credit, and innovative institutions such as national banks and capital markets. Europeans, including the settler societies in North America, improvised frantically: people faced the task of everyday exchange in changing media; governments took up the project of creating currencies that supported their political power; artists and writers raced to represent new forms of wealth and interpret the issues they raised; and intellectuals struggled to conceptualize, and tame, patterns of monetary transformation. The result was a rich debate, still unsettled, about the sources of value, the morality of the market, and the very nature of money. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of technologies, ideas, ritual and religion, the everyday, art and representation, interpretation, and the issues of the age.