A History of Economic Thought: From Aristotle to Arrow

A History of Economic Thought is a text for undergraduate history of economic thought courses. It covers the major writers and schools of thought; in doing so, it reveals not only ideas, but relevant stories of the lives of the great economic thinkers. It offers a comprehensive coverage of the latest technical advances in economic theory including contemporary developments in microeconomics as well as discussions of the rational expectations revolution. Contemporary economics, although written in a mathematical language not used by most economists in the long history of the subject, is a continuation of many of the concerns of the past, and the text explores the ways in which the economics of our age – indeed, any age – develops out of both the writings of the past and the concerns of the present.

1. Introduction. 2. The Scholastics and the Mercantilists. 3. One Foot in the Mercantilist World and One in the Classical. 4. The Physiocrats. 5. Adam Smith. 6. Thomas R. Malthus. 7. David Ricardo, Classical Monetary Theory, and Say′s Law. 8. David Ricardo′s Principles of Political Economy . 9. Classical Economics From Ricardo to Mill′s Principles . 10. John Stuart Mill. 11. Marx and Engels. 12. Precursors of the Marginal Revolution. 13. Carl Menger and the Austrian School. 14. William Stanley Jevons and the Marginal Revolution. 15. Leon Walras. 16. Alfred Marshall. 17. American Economics: Benjamin Franklin to Irving Fisher. 18. The Monopolistic Competition Revolution. 19. John Maynard Keynes. 20. Modern Times: Macroeconomics. 21. Modern Times: Econometrics and Microeconomics

Charles E. Staley has written extensively on international economics and the history of economic thought. Professor Staley studied economics as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, where he later taught, and went on to receive a Ph. D from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he wrote his dissertation under Charles Kindleberger. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and has held Ford Foundation Faculty and Research Fellowship at Harvard.

"Staley′s goal is above all to show the student that economic thought has a fascinating history, and he has succeeded well." The Economic Journal "One of the best undergraduate textbooks on the history of economics to have appeared in the last few years." Mark Blaug, University of London