History Of Economics

Economics as practised is obsessively concerned with the future. Yet economic ideas are very much a product of their time and place. If we are to understand modern economics, we can do so only through an understanding of its past, including the powerful and vested interests that moulded the theories to their financial advantage. This is the message of John Kenneth Galbraith's brilliant account of the history of economics. From Aristotle's ethical judgements on slavery and usury, through the pre-Revolutionary French philosophers in defence of agriculture, Adam Smith on early capitalism and Marx's reaction to it, the birth of the welfare state, the Keynesian Revolution and on to the controversial ideas of Milton Friedman, this book puts economists and their ideas securely in the life of their times. Most important, it shows how some of those ideas shape not only our present but our future too.