This highly original work offers an intellectual history of four central theories underlying the market economic system, focusing on their conception, evolution, and applications. Four Central Theories of the Market Economy traces the root of the theories, their conception and articulation, as well as their evolutions to the present time. It focuses on the four theories that are generally recognized as fundamental to the discipline of economics: the invisible hand, comparative advantage, the law of markets, and the quantity theory of money. These theories have profoundly influenced the world. Chapters explore their rich intellectual history from classical Greece to today, drawing on the original works of the great economic minds of the classical era and other thinkers who prepared the path for them, as well as those who refined their works or challenged them. This volume will leave the reader with a deep understanding of these pillars of the market economic system in the context of their historical development. This book will be of great interest to all scholars and students of economics who are interested in the intellectual history of their discipline as well as scholars and students of intellectual history who are interested in economics.

Speculative Fictions places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature. By studying Hamilton as an economic and imaginative writer, it argues that we can recast the conflict with the Jeffersonians as a literary debate about the best way to explain and describe modern capitalism, and explores how various other literary forms allow us to comprehend the complexities of a modern global economy in entirely new ways. Speculative Fictions identifies two overlooked literary genres of the late eighteenth-century as exemplary of this narrative mode. It asks that we read periodical essays and Black Atlantic captivity narratives with an eye not towards bourgeois subject formation, but as descriptive analyses of economic systems. In doing so, we discover how these two literary genres offer very different portraits of a global economy than that rendered by the novel, the imaginative genre we are most likely to associate with modern capitalism. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for the speculative, digressive, and unsystematic plotlines of these earlier narratives has the capacity to generate new imaginative projects with which to make sense of our increasingly difficult economic world.

Firms are a ubiquitous feature of the economic landscape, with much of the activity undertaken within an economy taking place within their boundaries. Given the size of the contribution made by firms to economic activity, employment and growth, having a theoretical understanding of the nature and structure of firms is crucial for understanding how an economy functions. The Theory of the Firm firstly offers a brief overview of the past, consisting of a concise discussion of the classical view of production, followed by an outline of the development of the neoclassical - or ‘textbook’ - approach to firm level production. Secondly, the ‘present’ of the theory of the firm is discussed in three sections. The first section considers the post-1970 theory of the firm literature per se, while the second section scrutinises the relationship between the three most prominent of the modern sets of theories: the reference point, property rights and transaction cost approaches. The third section looks at the theory of privatisation. The unique aspects of this book includes its discussions of the post-1970 contributions to the theory of the firm; the integration of the theory of the entrepreneur with the theory of the firm; and the theory of privatisation. This volume offers an intuitive introduction to the theories of the firm as well as simple formal models of the most important contributions to the literature. It also outlines the historical evolution of the traditional and modern theories of the firm. This book is of great interest to those who study history of economic thought, industrial economics and organizational studies.

This is the opus magnum of one of the world’s most renowned experts on the history of economic thought, Bertram Schefold. It contains commentaries from the series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie (Classics of Economics), which have been translated into English for the first time. Schefold’s choices of authors for this series, which he has edited since 1991, and his comments on the various re-edited works, are proof of his highly original and thought-provoking interpretation of the history of economic thought. Together with a companion volume, Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical School: Translations from the series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie, this book is a collection of English translations with introductions by Bertram Schefold. The emphasis of this volume is on the theoretical debates, from the theory of value to imperfect completion; from money to the institutional framework of society; and from the history of economic thought to pioneering works in mathematical economics. This volume is an important contribution to the history of economic thought, not only because it delivers original and fresh insights about well-known figures, such as Marx, Stackelberg, Sraffa, Samuelson, Tooke, Hilferding, Schmoller and Chayanov, but also because it deals with ideas and authors who have been forgotten or neglected in previous literature. This volume is of great interest to those who study the history of economic thought, economic theory and philosophy, as well as those who enjoyed the author’s previous volume, Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical School.