This book examines the development of the ideas of the new Austrian school from its beginnings in Vienna in the 1870s to the present. It focuses primarily on showing how the coherent theme that emerges from the thought of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Lachmann, Israel Kirzner and a variety of new younger Austrians is an examination of the implications of time and ignorance (or processes and knowledge) for economic theory.

From the end of World War I through the early years of the Cold War, international organizations such as the League of Nations, International Labor Organization, the Bank for International Settlements, and the United Nations had a major influence on policies adopted among member nations. This book surveys ideas produced by those organizations on such vital matters as the international business cycle; trade policy; social policy; public expenditure; taxation and government investment activity; money and exchange rate management; wage setting and full employment and the rich country-poor...

This book presents a historical investigation of the theoretical development of contemporary Equilibrium Business Cycle Theory (EBCT).

In the 1830s, the "new science of law" aimed to explain the working rules of human society by using the methodologically individual terms of economic discourse. Practitioners were inclined to admit altruistic values, bounded rationality, and institutional inertia into their research programs. This positive analysis of law tended to push normative discussions up from the level of specific laws to society's political organization. Late-twentieth-century institutional economics is currently developing greater resemblances to this now-forgotten new science.

This book provides a detailed picture of the institutionalist movement in American economics concentrating on the period between the two World Wars. The discussion brings a new emphasis on the leading role of Walton Hamilton in the formation of institutionalism, on the special importance of the ideals of science and social control embodied within the movement, on the large and close network of individuals involved, on the educational programs and research organizations created by institutionalists, and on the significant place of the movement within the mainstream of interwar American...

This book provides a contextual study of the development of Alfred Marshall s thinking during the early years of his apprenticeship in the Cambridge moral sciences. Marshall s thought is situated in a crisis of academic liberal thinking that occurred in the late 1860s. His crisis of faith is shown to have formed part of his wider philosophical development, which saw him supplementing Anglican thought and mechanistic psychology with Hegel s Philosophy of History. This philosophical background informed Marshall s early reformulation of value theory and his subsequent wide-ranging...

This book presents an account and technical assessment of Marx s economic analysis in Capital, with particular reference to the transformation and the surplus-value doctrine, the reproduction schemes, the falling real-wage and profit rates, and the trade cycle. The focus is on criticisms that Marx himself might have been expected to face in his day and age. In addition, it offers a chronological study of the evolution of that analysis from the early 1840s through three drafts: documents of the late 1840s, the Grundrisse of 1857 1858, and the Economic Manuscripts of 1861 1863. It also provides...

The outline of modern macroeconomics took shape in Britain in the early nineteenth century thanks, in part, to David Ricardo, one of the most influential economists of the time. Britain was challenged by monetary inflation, industrial unemployment and the loss of jobs abroad. Ricardo pointed the way forward. As a financier and Member of Parliament, he was well versed in politics and commercial affairs. His expertise is shown by the practicality of his proposals, including the resumption of the gold standard, which was essential given the destabilizing policy of the Bank of England. Ricardo's...

The Victorian polymath William Stanley Jevons (1835 82) is generally and rightly venerated as one of the great innovators of economic theory and method in what came to be known as the 'marginalist revolution'. This book is an investigation into the cultural and intellectual resources that Jevons drew upon to revolutionize research methods in economics. Jevons's uniform approach to the sciences was based on a firm belief in the mechanical constitution of the universe and a firm conviction that all scientific knowledge was limited and therefore hypothetical in character. Jevons's mechanical...

This book provides a comprehensive survey of the major developments in monetary theory and policy from David Hume and Adam Smith to Walter Bagehot and Knut Wicksell. In particular, it seeks to explain why it took so long for a theory of central banking to penetrate mainstream thought. The book investigates how major monetary theorists understood the roles of the invisible and visible hands in money, credit, and banking; what they thought about rules and discretion and the role played by commodity-money in their conceptualizations; whether or not they distinguished between the two different...