This book, Robert Heilbroner's classic overview of major thinkers in the history of economics, is truly excellent. I've been using it to base a series of informal discussions on, for a student society I help run that aims to push for critical analysis and pluralism in the university economics curriculum - we were doing a three-part talk on how economics has grown and evolved as a subject, and this book was a good place to start in terms of giving a general outline.
I've already spent a good twenty hours or so over the past month condensing this book into three thirty-minute-long chunks of digestible information, and there's so much depth of explanation I could now go to in terms of the book's content that it'd end up being far too long of a post for me to be able to be bothered to write, so I'll only give a very brief (well, as brief as it'll go without being dull or vacuous) overview.
Heilbroner gives us the story of what economics is, told from those who thrust it forwards into intellectual frontiers as-then unexplored: from the recesses of pre-modern history where, despite millennia of scarcity, trade and debt, it had yet to develop as a field of study; through its gradual coalescence into a vision of society as capitalism took hold of 18th century Europe, until Adam Smith first undertook to draw from the ideas of many thinkers of his day a complete theory of how nations' wealth worked, grew, fell, failed, expanded. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo and their not-so-cheerful theories of inevitable poverty-based automatic population controls and viciously competitive profit-erosion followed, and the classical school of economic thought began to take shape. This entire system of thinking was recorded in a comprehensive survey by J.S. Mill, around the time where mid-to-late-19th century Europe was growing restless from the continual misery inflicted upon the working masses by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and generally just capitalism[isation]. In moral response to the broadening inequalities and exploitations, utopians sprang up, most as eccentric in character as bizarre in theory (Saint-Simon and Fourier sound like great fun); but on the serious side a pair of bitingly-logical analytic socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels here developed ideas that would expose the fundamental internal inconsistencies of capitalism; ideas that would start revolutions and shape the next 130 years. However great the social impact of the radical leftist thinkers however, academic economics had taken a very different turn - economists like Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth and Stanley Jevons had begun reforming the subject into mathematical-based abstractions and models, and inevitable detachment from the more basic questions of underlying assumptions and political implications. This was the beginning of the birth of the neoclassical school of thought (which now dominates all economics studies, hence the recent national push for pluralism). Other than Thorstein Veblen (whose bottomless cynicism exposed the brutally-selfish heart of all society, primarily economics, which he also emphasised the post-industrial-revolution dependence of on technological development) and Joseph Schumpeter (who showed the limits of economics against an object of study that is, frankly, unpredictable), the book nears its end on John Maynard Keynes; the giant of 20th century thinking who, with impeccable clarity and rationality, showed governments the best way of breaking out of a slump - by compensating for depressed investment and stimulating consumption with a kick-starting burst of public-sector spending. His ideas declined in fashionability throughout the 20th century though, and while a few of the less-debatable aspects have been incorporated into post-Keynesian neoclassical economics, his grand vision of society is no longer prevalent within the academic ring of those professing to be economists. The book ends on a provocative note about the conflict between where the subject has gone now (well into thinking of itself, thoroughly problematically, as a science) and where these key figures in its evolution saw it as going; if economics continues to be dominated by maths and models instead of insightful observation of actual economies, then "worldly philosophy" is dead. Again, hence that whole campaign thing.
I'd recommend anyone read this book; especially if you're interested in economics or politics or history or philosophy or sociology or whatever, and compulsory if you're a student of economics. Heilbroner's done an amazing job of conveying the core theories of the big thinkers simply without diluting them, and the grand narrative of how the "dismal science" has grown up is interspersed with delightfully colourful mini-biographies of those who helped push it forwards (these are extremely enjoyable; Robert Owen and J.M. Keynes in particular just had awesome lives), and a topic that has the potential of considerable stultification becomes lively, fascinating, and a joy to read about.
Heilbroner gives us the story of what economics is, told from those who thrust it forwards into intellectual frontiers as-then unexplored: from the recesses of pre-modern history where, despite millennia of scarcity, trade and debt, it had yet to develop as a field of study; through its gradual coalescence into a vision of society as capitalism took hold of 18th century Europe, until Adam Smith first undertook to draw from the ideas of many thinkers of his day a complete theory of how nations' wealth worked, grew, fell, failed, expanded. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo and their not-so-cheerful theories of inevitable poverty-based automatic population controls and viciously competitive profit-erosion followed, and the classical school of economic thought began to take shape. This entire system of thinking was recorded in a comprehensive survey by J.S. Mill, around the time where mid-to-late-19th century Europe was growing restless from the continual misery inflicted upon the working masses by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and generally just capitalism[isation]. In moral response to the broadening inequalities and exploitations, utopians sprang up, most as eccentric in character as bizarre in theory (Saint-Simon and Fourier sound like great fun); but on the serious side a pair of bitingly-logical analytic socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels here developed ideas that would expose the fundamental internal inconsistencies of capitalism; ideas that would start revolutions and shape the next 130 years. However great the social impact of the radical leftist thinkers however, academic economics had taken a very different turn - economists like Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth and Stanley Jevons had begun reforming the subject into mathematical-based abstractions and models, and inevitable detachment from the more basic questions of underlying assumptions and political implications. This was the beginning of the birth of the neoclassical school of thought (which now dominates all economics studies, hence the recent national push for pluralism). Other than Thorstein Veblen (whose bottomless cynicism exposed the brutally-selfish heart of all society, primarily economics, which he also emphasised the post-industrial-revolution dependence of on technological development) and Joseph Schumpeter (who showed the limits of economics against an object of study that is, frankly, unpredictable), the book nears its end on John Maynard Keynes; the giant of 20th century thinking who, with impeccable clarity and rationality, showed governments the best way of breaking out of a slump - by compensating for depressed investment and stimulating consumption with a kick-starting burst of public-sector spending. His ideas declined in fashionability throughout the 20th century though, and while a few of the less-debatable aspects have been incorporated into post-Keynesian neoclassical economics, his grand vision of society is no longer prevalent within the academic ring of those professing to be economists. The book ends on a provocative note about the conflict between where the subject has gone now (well into thinking of itself, thoroughly problematically, as a science) and where these key figures in its evolution saw it as going; if economics continues to be dominated by maths and models instead of insightful observation of actual economies, then "worldly philosophy" is dead. Again, hence that whole campaign thing.
I'd recommend anyone read this book; especially if you're interested in economics or politics or history or philosophy or sociology or whatever, and compulsory if you're a student of economics. Heilbroner's done an amazing job of conveying the core theories of the big thinkers simply without diluting them, and the grand narrative of how the "dismal science" has grown up is interspersed with delightfully colourful mini-biographies of those who helped push it forwards (these are extremely enjoyable; Robert Owen and J.M. Keynes in particular just had awesome lives), and a topic that has the potential of considerable stultification becomes lively, fascinating, and a joy to read about.
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