A history of economics : the past as the present

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 this account.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 in the life of their times and it shows how some of those ideas shape not only our present but our future too.