This book presents, for the first time, a detailed transcription of Jacob Viner’s Economics 301 class as taught in 1930. These lecture notes provide insight into the legacy of Jacob Viner, whose seminal contributions to fields such as international economics and the history of economics are well known, but whose impact in sparking the revival of Marshallian microeconomics in the United States via his classroom teaching has been less appreciated. Generations of graduate students at the University of Chicago have taken Economics 301. The course has been taught by such luminaries as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker, and remains an introduction to the analytical tools of microeconomics and the distinctive Chicago way of thinking about the market system. This demanding and rigorous course first became famous in the 1930s when it was taught by Jacob Viner. When read in tandem with the Transaction editions of Milton Friedman’s Price Theory, Frank Knight’s The Economic Organization, and Gary Becker’s Economic Theory, Viner’s lectures provide the reader with important insights into the formative period of Chicago price theory. These recently discovered notes from Viner’s class will be important for historians of economic thought and anyone interested in the origins of the Chicago School of Economics.
This new reader in the history of economic thought is edited by two of the most respected figures in the field. With clearly written summaries putting each selection into context, this book will be of great use to students and lecturers of the history of economic thought as it goes beyond the simple reprinting of articles. Selections and discussions include such thinkers as Aristotle, John Locke, François Quesnay, David Hume, Jean-Baptiste Say, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevons, Irving Fisher and Thorstein Veblen. The History of Economic Thought: A Reader can be used as a core textbook or as a supplementary text on courses in economic thought and philosophy, and will provide readers with a good foundation in the different schools of thought that run through economics.
Ranking among the most distinguished economists and scholars of his generation, Jacob Viner is best remembered for his work in international economics and in the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug, in his Great Economists Since Keynes (Cambridge, 1985) remarked that Viner was "quite simply the greatest historian of economic thought that ever lived." Never before, however, have Viner's important contributions to the intellectual history of economics been collected into one convenient volume. This book performs this valuable service to scholarship by reprinting Viner's classic essays on such topics as Adam Smith and laissez-faire, the intellectual history of laissez-faire, and power versus plenty as an objective of foreign policy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Also included are Viner's penetrating and previously unpublished Wabash College lectures. "Jacob Viner was one of the truly great economists of this century as both teacher and scholar. This collection ... covers a wide range with special emphasis on the history of thought. Today's economists will find [the essays] just as thought-provoking and as illuminating as did his contemporaries. They have aged very well indeed."--Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution "Jacob Viner was a great and original economic theorist. What is rarer, Viner was a learned scholar. What is still rarer, Viner was a wise scientist. This new anthology of his writings on intellectual history is worth having in every economist's library--to sample at intervals over the years in the reasoned hope that Viner's wisdom will rub off on the reader and for the pleasure of his writing."--Paul A. Samuelson, MIT "I am frankly jealous of those who will be reading Viner's essays for the first time, marvelling at his learning, amused by his dry wit, instructed by his wisdom. But although I cannot share their joy of discovery, I shall be able to savor the subtleties that emerge from rereading these splendid essays."--George J. Stigler, University of Chicago "This volume will be a treat for the reader who appreciates scholarship, felicitous use of language, and the workings of a great mind. The Wabash lectures are gems, and the introduction by Douglas Irwin contributes significantly to our understanding of Viner's accomplishments."--William J. Baumol, Princeton University/New York University Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
An instant "New York Times" bestseller, from the author of "A Beautiful Mind": a sweeping history of the invention of modern economics that takes readers from Dickens' London to modern Calcutta.
Featuring original contributions from some of the leading contemporary figures in the history of economic thought, this book offers new perspectives on key topics, from Smith's Wealth of Nations to the Jevonian Revolution. Drawing inspiration from the life and work of R.D.C. Black, formerly Professor of Economics at Queen's University Belfast, this book will be of essential interest to any serious scholar of economic thought.
Over the past forty years, economists associated with the University of Chicago have won more than one-third of the Nobel prizes awarded in their discipline and have been major influences on American public policy. Building Chicago Economics presents the first collective attempt by social science historians to chart the rise and development of the Chicago School during the decades that followed the Second World War. Drawing on new research in published and archival sources, contributors examine the people, institutions and ideas that established the foundations for the success of Chicago economics and thereby positioned it as a powerful and controversial force in American political and intellectual life.
