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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2010

Heinrich Bortis
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
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Summary

The history of economic theory is also the history of its increasing fragmentation. The remarkable unity of the subject to be found in Ricardo's Principles, the masterpiece of classical political economy, has vanished in the course of time. The classical system, built upon François Quesnay's physiocratic foundations, already contained the seeds of divergence and gave birth to alternative grand systems. Adam Smith's emphasis on behaviour and exchange favoured the development of neoclassical economics, as first comprehensively systematized by William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall and Carl Menger. David Ricardo started from the social process of production to tackle the fundamental problems of value and distribution. His labour theory of value and his surplus principle of distribution became parts of a fundamental critique of capitalism within the wider framework of the economic theory of socialism, sketched by the early French socialists and by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and elaborated by a variety of economists, prominent examples being Maurice Dobb, Oscar Lange and Paul Sweezy. Large parts of liberal (neoclassical) and socialist economics are strongly normative in character in that the functioning of markets and of the planning mechanism are studied under conditions which are ideal in certain respects, and where real-world imperfections are interpreted as deviations from the norm. However, the occurrence of periodic crises maintained the doubts over Say's law on the impossibility of general overproduction, even among the classical economists, as the example of Thomas Malthus shows. Subsequently these doubts gave rise to the elaboration of comprehensive positive systems aimed at explaining the functioning of free and mixed market economies.

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Institutions, Behaviour and Economic Theory
A Contribution to Classical-Keynesian Political Economy
, pp. xi - xxi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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  • Preface
  • Heinrich Bortis, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Book: Institutions, Behaviour and Economic Theory
  • Online publication: 14 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582349.001
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  • Preface
  • Heinrich Bortis, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Book: Institutions, Behaviour and Economic Theory
  • Online publication: 14 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582349.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Heinrich Bortis, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
  • Book: Institutions, Behaviour and Economic Theory
  • Online publication: 14 January 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582349.001
Available formats
×