Mark Blaug: Economic Theory in Retrospect

This is a fully revised fourth edition of a book that has made a name for itself as a unique textbook on the history of economic thought. Teachers who have long deplored the antiquarian flavor of so many books in this field will welcome a text such as this one which studies theories rather than theorists, and which focuses on the logical coherence and explanatory value of the mainstream of economic ideas, undiluted by biographical coloring or historical digressions. Students who have grown weary of reading secondhand commentaries on the great economists, which really bring them no nearer to the original masterpieces of economics, will derive fresh inspiration from the detailed Reader’s Guides provided here: chapter by chapter, and sometimes paragraph by paragraph, the author takes us through the leading works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, Philip Wicksteed, and Knut Wicksell. A series of annotated bibliographies then guide the student through the enormous literature that has grown up around these classics. For the present edition, the later chapters of the book on monetary theory and macroeconomics have been entirely rewritten to take account of the rise of monetarism and rational expectations. The continuous debate on what-Keynes-really-meant has resulted in a thorough revision of the Keynes chapter, marking the successive stages in what is now a history of interpretations of Keynes over a period of almost 50 years. There is an entirely new chapter on the history of location theory, a subject almost totally neglected in rival histories of economic thought. There are minor additions to the earlier chapters on Ricardo and Marx and major additions to the middle chapters on marginal productivity theory and welfare economics, such as new sections on the history of the concept of entrepreneurship and recent developments in the never-ending controversy about marginal cost pricing of public utilities. And, of course, the Notes on Further Readings have been thoroughly updated.