As a broad introduction to the history of economic thought – based on courses the authors have taught for many years – this book provides a magisterial overview for students and teachers who have not had the opportunity to cover the development of the field of economics in its historical context.The text is presented as a series of twenty-four lectures, which can be used as the basis for self-study or for the delivery of a course. Each lecture presents an outline of aims, a select ...

The definitive guide to the history of economic thought, fully revised twenty years after first publicationRoger Backhouse's definitive guide takes the story of economic thinking from the ancient world to the present day, with a brand-new chapter on the twenty-first century and updates throughout to reflect the latest scholarship.Covering topics including globalisation, inequality, financial crises and the environment, Backhouse brings his breadth of expert...

Paul A. Samuelson is widely regarded as the world's leading economist in the so-called “Age of Keynes”, the three decades after WWII, acknowledged by his being the first American to win the Nobel prize in economics. Foundations of Economic Analysis was a manual on how economic theory should be done, and the nineteen editions of Economics: An Introductory Analysis provided the first exposure to economics for millions of students worldwide. Volume I of this intellectual bio...

The welfare state has, over the past forty years, come under increasing attack from liberals who consider comprehensive welfare provision inimical to liberalism. Yet, many of the architects of the post-World War II welfare states were liberals, many of whom were economists as much as socialists. Liberalism and the Welfare State investigates the thinking of liberal economists about welfare, focusing on Britain, Germany and Japan, each of which had a different tradition of economic ...

First published in 1993. The importance of language in economics has been neglected and dominated by techniques from other disciplines. This looks at the wider methological implications of language within economics in a practical and theoretical way.

Paul Samuelson was at the heart of a revolution in economics. He was "the foremost academic economist of the 20th century," according to the New York Times, and the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. His work transformed the field of economics and helped give it the theoretical and mathematic rigor that increased its influence in business and policy making. In Founder of Modern Economics, Roger E. Backhouse explores the central importance of Samuelson's p...

This compact volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. A final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a who...

A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences includes essays on the ways in which the histories of psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history and political science have been written since the Second World War. Bringing together chapters written by the leading historians of each discipline, the book establishes significant parallels and contrasts and makes the case for a comparative interdisciplinary historiography. This comparative approach helps explain historiographical de...

Interpreting Macroeconomics explores a variety of different approaches to macroeconomic thought. The book considers a number of historiographical and methodological positions, as well as analyzing various important episodes in the development of macroeconomics, before during and after the Keynesian revolution. Roger Backhouse shows that the full richness of these developments can only by brought out by approaches which blend both relativism and absolutism, and historical and ratio...

John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was the most important economist of the twentieth century. He was also a philosopher who wrote on ethics and the theory of probability and was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. In this volume contributors from a wide range of disciplines offer new interpretations of Keynes's thought, explain the links between Keynes's philosophy and his economics, and place his work and Keynesianism - the economic theory, the principles of econ...

Does economics hold the key to everything or does the recent financial crisis show that it has failed? This book provides an assessment of modern economics that cuts through the confusion and controversy on this question. Case studies of the creation of new markets, the Russian transition to capitalism, globalization, and money and finance establish that economics has been very successful where problems have been well defined and where the world can be changed to fit the theory, but that i...

This book tells the story of the search for disequilibrium micro-foundations for macroeconomic theory, from the disequilibrium theories of Patinkin, Clower and Leijonhufvud to recent dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with imperfect competition. Placing this search against the background of wider developments in macroeconomics, the authors contend that this was never a single research program, but involved economists with very different aims who developed the basic ideas about q...