A history of economic doctrines : $b from the time of the physiocrats to the present day.

Ideas about wealth, value and the ordering of society have their own history, and this influential survey follows that history from the eighteenth-century Physiocrats down through the founders and reformers of modern economics.

What it's about

A History of Economic Doctrines: From the Time of the Physiocrats to the Present Day is a systematic account of the development of economic theory. It begins with the Physiocrats and their vision of a natural economic order, moves through the classical political economy of Adam Smith and his successors, and traces the succession of schools and debates — the optimists and critics, the socialists, the marginalists and others — that carried economic thought toward the modern age. Rather than argue a single position, it seeks to explain each doctrine in turn, showing what its thinkers held and how each school answered, extended or opposed those before it.

Themes

The book is concerned with the evolution of ideas — how theories of value, production, distribution and the role of the state arose, contended and gave way to one another. It attends to the interplay between economic thought and its historical setting, and to the enduring questions of liberty, justice and the organisation of economic life that each school addressed in its own way.

Why it still matters

Long a standard work in its field, this history remains a lucid guide to the intellectual lineage of modern economics. Understanding where economic ideas came from — the assumptions behind them and the debates that shaped them — is essential to reading the discipline critically today. The book offers exactly that grounding, with clarity and balance.

Who it's for

For students of economics and the history of ideas, readers who want to understand the roots of modern economic debate, and anyone curious about how theories of wealth and society developed over two centuries.