Great Economic Thinkers from the Classicals to the Moderns

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.

Schefold invites the reader to understand the history of economic thought not as a discipline which primarily wants to discover the earliest author to have expressed a thought which might still be important today. "The texts are really interesting only if we recognise a ‘political’ dimension and try to interpret them as expressions of the will to shape, to preserve or to change the world", he writes. Schefold [...] tries to build a bridge from the traditional history of economic theories to a universal history of economic thought.- Gerald Braunberger, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)"...this is a truly great achievement in the history of economic thought; it is comparable to that of Schumpeter’s when he wrote the History of Economic Analysis in the middle of the previous century."- Kiichiro Yagi, Setsunan University, Neyagawa city, Osaka, Japan

Bertram Schefold is Senior Professor at the Department of Economics, Goethe-Universität, Germany. He has published more than 40 books and 250 articles on economic theory, history of economic thought, energy policy and general economic policy. He edited the series Klassiker der Nationalökonomie.