The wealth of ideas : a history of economic thought / Alessandro Roncaglia.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roncaglia, Alessandro, 1947-

Standardized Title:

Ricchezza delle idee. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Economics--History.

Economics.

History.

Physical Description:

xiv, 582 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, UK ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Summary:

The Wealth of Ideas traces the history of economic thought, from its prehistory (the Bible, Classical antiquity) to the present day. In this eloquently written, scientifically rigorous and well documented book, chapters on William Petty, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, Leon Walras, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Joseph Schumpeter and Piero Sraffa alternate with chapters on other important figures and on debates of the period. Economic thought is seen as developing between two opposite poles: a subjective one, based on the ideas of scarcity and utility, and an objective on based on the notions of physical costs and surplus. Professor Roncaglia focuses on the different views of the economy and society and on their evolution over time and critically evaluates the foundations of the scarcity-utility approach in comparison with the Classical/Keynesian approach.

Contents:

1 The history of economic thought and its role 1

2 The cumulative view 2

3 The competitive view 5

4 The stages of economic theorising: conceptualisation and model-building 11

5 Political economy and the history of economic thought 13

6 Which history of economic thought? 14

2 The prehistory of political economy 18

1 Why we call it prehistory 18

2 Classical antiquity 23

3 Patristic thought 28

4 The Scholastics 31

5 Usury and just price 34

6 Bullionists and mercantilists 41

7 The birth of economic thought in Italy: Antonio Serra 46

3 William Petty and the origins of political economy 53

1 Life and writings 53

2 Political arithmetic and the method of economic science 55

3 National state and economic system 58

4 Commodity and market 63

5 Surplus, distribution, prices 69

4 From body politic to economic tables 76

1 The debates of the time 76

2 John Locke 80

3 The motivations and consequences of human actions 84

4 Bernard de Mandeville 87

5 Richard Cantillon 90

6 Francois Quesnay and the physiocrats 96

7 The political economy of the Enlightenment: Turgot 103

8 The Italian Enlightenment: the Abbe Galiani 107

9 The Scottish Enlightenment: Francis Hutcheson and David Hume 111

5 Adam Smith 115

1 Life 115

3 The moral principle of sympathy 121

4 The wealth of nations 126

5 Value and prices 134

6 Natural prices and market prices 139

7 The origin of the division of labour: Smith and Pownall 145

8 Economic and political liberalism: Smith's fortune 149

6 Economic science at the time of the French Revolution 155

1 The perfectibility of human societies, between utopias and reforms 155

2 Malthus and the population principle 158

3 'Say's law' 164

4 Under-consumption theories: Lauerdale, Malthus, Sismondi 167

5 The debate on the poor laws 169

6 The debate on the colonies 172

7 Bentham's utilitarianism 174

7 David Ricardo 179

1 Life and works 179

2 Ricardo's dynamic vision 181

3 From the corn model to the labour theory of value 186

4 Absolute value and exchangeable value: the invariable standard of value 191

5 Money and taxation 196

6 International trade and the theory of comparative costs 201

7 On machinery: technological change and employment 203

8 The 'Ricardians' and the decline of Ricardianism 207

1 The forces in the field 207

2 Robert Torrens 209

3 Samuel Bailey 215

4 Thomas De Quincey 218

5 John Ramsey McCulloch 219

6 The Ricardian socialists and cooperativism 221

7 William Nassau Senior and the anti-Ricardian reaction 226

8 Charles Babbage 230

9 John Stuart Mill and philosophical radicalism 233

10 Mill on political economy 238

9 Karl Marx 244

2 Life and writings 245

3 The critique of the division of labour: alienation and commodity fetishism 249

4 The critique of capitalism and exploitation 251

5 Accumulation and expanded reproduction 256

6 The laws of movement of capitalism 261

7 The transformation of labour values into prices of production 263

8 A critical assessment 268

9 Marxism after Marx 272

10 The marginalist revolution: the subjective theory of value 278

1 The 'marginalist revolution': an overview 278

2 The precursors: equilibrium between scarcity and demand 281

3 William Stanley Jevons 285

4 The Jevonian revolution 288

5 Real cost and opportunity cost 292

6 Philip Henry Wicksteed and Francis Ysidro Edgeworth 294

11 The Austrian school and its neighbourhood 297

1 Carl Menger 297

2 The 'Methodenstreit' 303

3 Max Weber 306

4 Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk 308

5 Knut Wicksell and the Swedish school 312

6 Friedrich von Hayek 315

12 General economic equilibrium 322

1 The invisible hand of the market 322

2 Leon Walras 326

3 Vilfredo Pareto and the Lausanne school 336

4 Irving Fisher 340

5 The debate on existence, uniqueness and stability of equilibrium 342

6 The search for an axiomatic economics 345

13 Alfred Marshall 350

1 Life and writings 350

2 The background 353

3 The Principles 357

4 Economics becomes a profession 366

5 Monetary theory: from the old to the new Cambridge school 368

6 Maffeo Pantaleoni 370

7 Marshallism in the United States: from John Bates Clark to Jacob Viner 372

8 Thornstein Veblen and institutionalism 374

9 Welfare economics: Arthur Cecil Pigou 376

10 Imperfect competition 379

11 Marshall's heritage in contemporary economic thought 382

14 John Maynard Keynes 384

1 Life and writings 384

2 Probability and uncertainty 388

3 The Treatise on money 391

4 From the Treatise to the General theory 395

5 The General theory 398

6 Defence and development 407

7 The asymmetries of economic policy in an open economy and international institutions 409

8 Michal Kalecki 411

9 The new Cambridge school 413

15 Joseph Schumpeter 416

1 Life 416

3 From statics to dynamics: the cycle 422

4 The breakdown of capitalism 428

5 The path of economic science 431

16 Piero Sraffa 435

1 First writings: money and banking 435

2 Friendship with Gramsci 438

3 Criticism of Marshallian theory 440

4 Imperfect competition and the critique of the representative firm 443

5 Cambridge: Wittgenstein and Keynes 445

6 The critical edition of Ricardo's writings 450

7 Production of commodities by means of commodities 452

8 Critique of the marginalist approach 457

9 The Sraffian schools 460

17 The age of fragmentation 468

2 The microeconomics of general economic equilibrium 471

3 The new theories of the firm 474

4 Institutions and economic theory 479

5 Macroeconomic theory after Keynes 480

6 The theory of growth 488

7 Quantitative research: the development of econometrics 491

8 New analytical techniques: theory of repeated games, theory of stochastic processes, chaos theory 496

9 Interdisciplinary problems and the foundations of economic science: new theories of rationality, ethics and new utilitarianism, growth and sustainable development, economic democracy and globalisation 500

18 Where are we going? Some (very tentative) considerations 505

1 How many paths has economic thought followed? 505

2 The division of labour among economists: can we forge ahead along different paths? 508

3 Which of the various paths should we be betting on? 511.

Notes:

"Originally published in Italian as La ricchezza delle idee by Laterza, 2001"--T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 515-563) and indexes.

ISBN:

0521843375

OCLC:

56950792

Online:

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