History of economic thought

Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The word 'economics' is from the Greek for οἶκος (oikos: house) and νόμος (nomos: custom or law), hence "rules of the house(hold)."

Origin of Economics takes its roots in the natural propensity of human beings to barter, to exchange or trade goods. Whilst there are no records of dogs ever having bartered bones, men has been bartering all sorts of goods since pre-history.

Economics as an independent science, and as we understand the word today, begins with the work of Adam Smith, The Wealth of the Nations. .

Before Smith, Economics was a chapter in political science, the art of managing a State. The list of acceptable definitions for Economics is enourmous. Economics is the study of those activities which, with or without money, involve exchange transactions among people. Economics is also the study of wealth. Several other definitions are acceptable

Paul Samuelson, in his famous book Economics - An Introductory Analysis, defines Economics as:"the study of how men and society 'choose', with or without the use of money, to employ 'scarce' productive resources to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now an in the future, among various people and groups in society"

Introduction

In antiquity various philosophers have studied Economics, the most famous of which being Aristotle, who created some important economic concepts in his books Politics and Nicomachean Ethics , both written around 350 B.C.

Aristotle analysed the economic processes around him and was able to define the place of economy within a society that included commercial buying and selling. His economic thought (especially his value theory) is inspiring but sometimes contradictory and inconsistent.

In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle distinguishes between use value and exchange value, defines value as the ability to satisfy wants and demand as being governed by the desirability of a good (i.e., its use value). According to Aristotle, exchange value is derived from use value as communicated through market demand.

Xenophon (420?-355? BC) wrote a book called Economics in which he analyses Socrates' positions on the subject.

Ibn Khaldun (1332- 1406) was a famous Muslim historiographer and historian born in present-day Tunisia and is viewed as one of the forerunners of modern historiography, sociology and economics. His best known book is Muqaddimah "Prolegomenon" Khaldun was the first to understand the important interaction of forces between Sociology and Economics. Some researchers have compared Ibn Khaldun to Marx, based on economic theories in section 1, chapter V of the Muqaddimah about "The real meaning and explanation of sustenance and profit or profit is the value realized from human labour".

In the middle ages the economic thought was dominated by the teachings of Roman Catholic Church, with the Scholastics, divided in two main and fiercily opposing schools, the Dominicans (St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and the School of Salamanca - which was initiated by Francisco de Vitoria around 1536 and counted Navarrus and de Soto as its most prominent theoreticians; its influence lasted until circa 1624), and the Franciscans (aproximately 1295-1495).

After the Scholastics era, we had, in that order, Sir William Petty, the Mercantilists, Richard Cantillon, Jacques Turgot and Enlightenment Economics, François Quesnay and the Physiocrats, David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, Ferdinando Galiani and the Italian Tradition and the Social Philosophers and Commentators

The period that runs from early antiquity until past the Physiocrats and ends before Adam Smith is called the "Pre-Classical" period of economic thought.

The "Classical" period of economic thought begins on 1776 with the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of the Nations. Written during the gentle era of Enlightenment, the laissez-faire policies of Adam Smith did not antecipate the economic and social upheavals that the industrial era was about to unleash. Only 13 years after its publication the French court was bankrupt, the French people took to the streets and beheaded their king; it was the French Revolution.

Among the economists who tried to understand the new phenomena three were outstanding: Jean-Baptiste Say, Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. They all had different visions for political economy after Smith. Of those, Ricardo was the most succesful and influential one and laid the basis for the Classical Economy that would become the mainstream economy thought for the whole of the XIX century

In the 1870's the Marginalist Revolution put an end to the Classical School and the era of the Neoclassical School, which lasts to today, began.

History

Pre-Classical Period

The Ancients and the Scholastics

Aristotle

In the Topics Aristotle made a philosophical analysis of human ends and means. He explains that the value of means, or instruments of production, are a function of the end products's utility to people.

For Aristotle, the economic dimension is the individual human action of using wealth.

According to Aristotle, human nature has a dual material and spiritual character. For him economics is an expression of that dual character and the economic sphere is the intersection between the corporeal and mental aspects of men.

Aristotle classifies economics as a practical science, as opposed to speculative sciences, such as mathematics and metaphysics.

For Aristotle economics is concerned with both the household and the polis, relating to the use of things required for the good (or "virtuous") life. Economics is aimed at the good and is fundamentally moral. For him Economics was embedded in politics, so it can be said that the study of political economy began with Aristotle.

Theory of Value

In the Politics , Aristotle views labor as a "commodity" that has value but does not give value. He did not see labor as a source of wealth. Aristotle formulated a "theory of the value of labor". Observing that labor skill is not a determinant of exchange value, he maintains that, in the end, the basic requirement of value is utility, which is related to a person's desires. Value is the ability to satisfy wants. Demand is governed by the desirability of a good (i.e., its use value). According to Aristotle, exchange value is derived from use value as communicated through market demand.

In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle distinguishes between "use value" and "exchange value". It was Aristotle who created the concept of "value in use". In addition, Aristotle distinguished between final goods and factors of production.

Aristotle antecipated the role of diminishing marginal utility in price formation. According to Aristotle, the quantity of a good reaches its saturation point when the use value plunges and becomes immaterial.

The Problem of Commensurability

Aristotle discovered, formulated, and analyzed the problem of commensurability. He wondered how ratios for the exchange of heterogeneous things could be set. Aristotle says that money, as a common measure of everything, makes things commensurable and makes it possible to equalize them. For Aristotle, money is a medium of exchange that makes exchange easier by translating subjective qualitative phenomena into objective quantitative phenomena.

The lending of money at interest is condemned as the most unnatural mode of acquisition. Aristotle insisted that money was barren.

Xenophon

Xenophon, was a soldier, philosopher and mercenary from ancient Greece who lived between 425 and 355 BC. He wrote a book called Economics, in which the cynic Kritoboulos and the sympathetic Isomachos engage in a philosophical exchange mediated by the figure of Socrates. The title is badly translated and misrepresents the book's subject. In Greek, the work "oikonomikon" signifies "household management". Xenophon's Economics verses instead about the management of agricultural endeavours focusing on the manner in which a good citizen ensures his own subsistence, along with a surplus for the state.

Xenophon, using Socrates's speaches, emphasizes the moral virtues of citizens and their freedom.

Ibn Khaldun

In his Prolegomena (The Muqaddimah), 'Abd al-Rahman Ibn Muhammad Ibn Khaldun al-Hadrami (A.D. 1332-1406), commonly known as Ibn Khaldun, a fourteenth century Muslim thinker, laid down the foundations of different fields of knowledge, in particular the science of civilization (al-'umran).

His contributions to economics place him in the history of economic thought as a forerunner, if not the "father", of economics. Ibn Khaldun planted the germinating seeds of classical economics analysing production, supply, or cost and pioneered in consumption, demand, and utility, the cornerstones of modern economic theory.

Ibn Khaldun was the first to systematically analyze the functioning of an economy, the importance of technology, specialization and foreign trade in economic surplus and the role of government and its stabilization policies to increase output and employment.

Ibn Khaldun, moreover, dealt with the problem of optimum taxation, minimum government services, incentives, institutional framework, law and order, expectations, production, and the theory of value.

For Ibn Khaldun, the role of the State is to establish law and order conducive for economic activities. The enforcement of property rights, the protection of trade routes and the security of peace are necessary for a civilized society to engage in trade and production.

For him "over-taxation" would occur when the demands bureaucracy and mercenary armies would expand beyond "normal" economic surplus.

For Ibn Khaldun, it is clear that "the profit human beings make is the value realized from their labor," but this value, the price of labor, is determined by the law of supply and demand, a point later missed by Karl Marx.

Khaldun recognized the advantages of specialization. For him, specialization meant the coordination of different functions of factors of production where, "what is obtained through the cooperation of a group, of human beings satisfies the need of a number many times greater (than themselves)."

There is a striking similarity in the economic thought of Ibn Khaldun and those of Adam Smith , writting four centuries apart. This leaves the question to ascertain direct or indirect links between these two great thinkers open to the economic historian. In thesis Adam Smith could have been exposed to Ibn Khaldun's contributions, even without having been aware of the author's name, during his six years research at Oxford University's library. However Khaldun's work has only been "discovered" by the West in the XIX century, when it was translated to western laguages.

The early Scholastics

The "Scholastics" refer to the group of 13th and 14th Century theologians, notably the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas , that set down the dogma of the Catholic Church in light of the resurrection of the Greek philosophy. In economics there were four themes the Scholastics were particularly concerned with: property, justice in economic exchange, money, and usury.

Private property and Christian teachings have been always at odds. In the 5th Century, the early Church fathers (the "Patricians", e.g. St. Augustine) had struck down "communistic" Christian movements and the Church itself went on to accumulate enormous amounts of property. In the 12th Century, St. Francis of Assisi began a movement (the "Franciscans"), which insisted on vows of poverty, "brotherhood" and deplored the accumulative tendencies of the Church.

Against the Franciscans were arrayed St. Thomas and the Dominicans, who dug out of Aristotle and the Bible the necessary arguments to put down their challenge. The Thomists took a practical stance.

Another question that arose was that of entrepreneurship. Should a merchant be allowed to profit from differentials in prices? The Scholastics replied with a qualified yes, provided the merchant is not motivated by pure gain and profit be only just enough to cover the "sacrifices" of the merchant. They argued that the trader is performing a valuable service and increasing general welfare by meeting different needs.

The charging of interest on money lent (usury), came quickly under scrutiny. There is no clear basis for a ban on usury in Christian scriptures. To early Church fathers, like St. Jerome, the Christian notion that "all men are brothers" necessarily implied that usury must be banned outright. Another patrician, St. Ambrose, decided that lending with interest to enemies in the course of a just war was permissible.

Clerics had been prohibited from lending at interest at least since the 4th Century.This ban was extended to laymen much later. In 1139, the Second Lateran Council denied all sacraments to unrepentant usurers and, in an 1142 decree, condemned any payment greater than the capital that was lent. Jews and Moors ("strangers" in Christian lands) were initially exempt, but the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) issued an admonition prohibiting non-Christians from charging "excessive usury" . In 1311, Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienna prohibited usury outright and condemned as "heretical" any secular legislation that tolerated it.

The issue of "justice in exchange" was a more complicated issue. Even if we hang the intrinsic value of a good on its "usefulness", how does one estimate what the "just price" (justum pretium) should be?. Following the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"), the Scholastics decided that a person should not charge more for a good than what he would be willing to pay for it himself.

The Salamanca School

The University of Salamanca, founded 1218, is one of the oldest universities in the world. It was a prominent Dominican bastion in the late Scholastic period. Home of the Thomistic theology, it maintained its full strenght even after the doctrines of St. Thomas Aquinas became under attack elsewhere in Europe, first under the Scotist and Nominalist onslaughts, and then from the Reformation.

"The School of Salamanca" begins with Francisco de Vitoria around 1536 and counted Navarrus and de Soto as its theoreticians. The Jesuit trio, Lessius, de Lugo and Luis Molina adhered to and further developed the Salamanca position.

During the confusing economic times of the inflationary 16th century, there was reversal of centuries of Scholastic thinking on economic matters. It was the Salamanca school that defined the just price as no more and no less than the naturally exchange-established price. Theologians moved away from past dogma and approached their questions in the spirit of natural law philosophy. Their analysis led them to trace a scarcity theory of value and employed supply-and-demand with dexterity. They rejected Duns Scotus's '"cost of production" conception of the just price, arguing that there was no objective way of determining price.

The Salamanca School discovered the essential properties of the "Quantity Theory of Money" , using it to explain the inflation of the 1500s arising from the influx of precious metals from Spanish America. They also provided a resounding defense of usury.

The ideas of the Salamanca School were fierciely opposed by the Franciscans Scholastics. Among them, John Duns Scotus, (1265-1308) an Oxford Franciscan theologian author of the Sententiae, 1295?, was the Thomists' most formidable opponent. Influenced by Neoplatonic mysticism, Scotus was the progenitor of the "Nominalist" movement that unravelled Thomism in the 16th Century.

In economic affairs he refused the "practical" Aristotlean resolutions of the Thomists, demanding proper explanations. In the process, he created a "cost theory of value" and formulated some interesting arguments about the nature of pure and monopolistic competition.

Jean Buridan, (c.1295 - 1358), was a French secular scholastic philosopher, a member of Ockham's "Nomalist School" who rose to become rector of the University of Paris, was a renowned critic of Aristotlean "just exchange" and was the originator of the "metallic theory of money".

Nicole de Oresme, (c.1320-1382) was a French theologian, student of Buridan, mathematician and originator of the "clockwork" theory of the universe. Oresme produced a succint analysis of currency debasement.

Gabriel Biel, (1425-1495), the "Last of the Scholastics" was one of the founders of the University of Tübingen. A late Nominalist, Biel is renowned for his defense of entrepreneurship and free contract. He undermined the concept of "just price" by noting that trade would actually not occur without advantages to the parties.

Sir William Petty and the Mercantilists

Sir William Petty

When British forces invaded Ireland in the 1650s, a problem emerged: how to partition the spoils among the victors or, more precisely, what were the spoils? The task of surveying Ireland and assessing its riches was given to a physician which had accompanied the British army, Sir William Petty. Thus, the first "econometrician" was born.

Petty's Political Anatomy (1672) is a work on Ireland. Petty was disciple of Hobbes and a Mercantilist in his policies.On his works one can find rudiments of the "labor theory of value". His writings were influential upon Davenant and Locke.

Mercantilists

Mercantilism is economic nationalism for the purpose of building a wealthy and powerful nation-state. Adam Smith coined the term "mercantile system" to describe it.

Bullionism was an early and primitive form of mercantilism and is most closely associated with 16th- and 17th-century Spain, which was thought to owe its prosperity and military might to the gold and silver of its New World colonies.

Colbertism was the mercantilism as idealized by the French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert, one of the most successful practitioners of mercantilism. He encouraged the growth of industry through subsidies and tariff protection, regulated the qualities and prices of manufactured and agricultural products, worked to break down trade barriers within France, initiated a vigorous road-building program, and restricted the use of natural resources.

Mercantilism was adopted as an economic philosophy by merchants and statesmen during the 16th and 17th centuries. Mercantilists believed that a nation-sate's wealth came primarily from the accumulation of gold and silver. Nation-sates without mines should obtain gold and silver by trade, selling more goods than they bought from abroad. For this purpose nation-sates intervened extensively in the free market, imposing tariffs on foreign goods to restrict imports and granting subsidies to incentivate exports of domestic goods. Mercantilism put commercial interests to the level of national states' policy.

The economic rationale for mercantilism during the sixteenth century was the consolidation of the regional power centers of the feudal era by large competitive nation-states. Contributing factors were the establishment of colonies outside Europe, the growth of European commerce and industry relative to agriculture, the increase in the volume and breadth of trade, and the increase in the use of metallic monetary systems, particularly gold and silver, as opposed to barter transactions.

During this period, military conflict between nation-states was more frequent than at any time in history. Each government's economic objective was to command a sufficient quantity of hard currency to support a military that would deter attacks by other countries and help its own territorial expansion.

Most of the mercantilist policies were the result of an interaction between the governments of the nation-states and their mercantile classes. In return for paying levies and taxes, the mercantile classes convinced governments to enact policies that would protect their business against competition.

Shipping became important during the mercantile period. With the growth of colonies and the shipment of gold from the New World into Spain and Portugal, control of the oceans was considered vitally important to national power. Navigation policies by France, England, and other powers were directed primarily against the Dutch, who dominated commercial marine activity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

During the mercantilist era it was believed that the principal benefit of foreign trade was the importation of gold and silver.

Adam Smith refuted the idea that the wealth of a nation is measured by the size of the treasury in his famous treatise, The Wealth of Nations.

The last vestiges of the mercantile era were removed in England by 1860.

Richard Cantillon, Jacques Turgot and Enlightenment Economics

Richard Cantillon (1680?-1734)

Richard Cantillon, considered by many historians to be the first great economic "theorist", was an obscure character. An Irishman with a Spanish name who lived in France, reputedly made a fortune of some twenty million livres under John Law's schemes before moving to England. Not much more is known about his life.

Cantillon's wrote one remarkable treatise, Essai Sur la Nature du Commerce en Général , written in French (circa 1732) which was published anonymously in England some twenty years after his death.

His work was well-known to the Physiocrats and the French school, but fell into obscurity in the English-speaking world until he became popularized by William Stanley Jevons in the 1880s.

Cantillon decribed the supply-and-demand mechanism for the determination of short-run market price (but not long-run natural price). This work placed him as a progenitor of the Marginalist Revolution. His notes on entrepreneurship (as a type of arbitrage) have made him an icon of the modern Austrian School. Cantillon was also one of the first to articulate a Quantity Theory of Money and its reasonings.

As a consequence of his theory, he defended a quasi-Mercantilist policy for a favorable balance of trade but with a twist: Cantillon recommended the importation of "land-based products" and the exporting of "non-land-based" products as a way of increasing a nation-state wealth.

Jacques Turgot (1727-1781)

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, (Baron de l'Aulne) was a leading economist of 18th Century France. His contributions were quite distinct and advanced considerably upon Physiocratic theories. Turgot have formed a distinct school of his own, counting the Abbé Morellet and the Marquis de Condorcet as close friends and disciples. Turgot exercised a deep influence upon Adam Smith, who was living in France in the 1760s and was on intimate terms with Turgot. Many of the concepts and ideas in Smith's Wealth of Nations are drawn directly from Turgot.

His major work was Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Riches (1766) in which Turgot introduced the concept of capital into the Physiocratic system. He clarified the meaning of "surplus" and made the connection between the "surplus" and "growth" and related profit rate to the rate of interest. He made clear the distinction between "market" price and "natural" price. Turgot differed from original Physiocrats on the nature of the "produit net", defending that surplus could be generated by industry as well as agriculture. His ideas were to be taken up by Adam Smith and the Classical School.

Turgot was also onde of the a forerunners of the Marginalist Revolution. On his book Valeurs et Monnaies (1769) he developed a demand-based theory of price. In that same work, he presents an account of how a large number of traders reduce the degree of indeterminacy of exchange, a topic later studied by Edgeworth. In his 1768 Observations he introduced the concept of variable input proportions in production. Turgot was also the first to conceive of the notion of diminishing marginal productivity to factor inputs. Finally, his 1766 discussion on money included the distinction (not made hitherto) between the "real" and "nominal" rates of interest.

Enlightenment Economics

Led by progresses in the science of astronomy during the 16th Century - specially after Galileo Galilei's discoveries, which marked a sort of "turning point" in the scientific thought - there were various changes in the philosophy of science and the induction/deduction methods. The creation of classical physics and the new medical theories contributed to launch the western civilizations through a deep tranformation which gave birth to the new "The Scientific Attitude". This paved the way to the birth of a period which became kown as "The Enlightenment Period", when profound changes took place in all of the social sciences, including Economics.

Several important authors published a sequence of books on Economics during the Enlightenment Period. Among them: Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws); Jean Jacques Rousseau (A Discourse on Political Economy), 1755; Caesar Beccaria (A Discourse on Public Economy and Commerce); Adam Ferguson (An Essay on the History of Civil Society), 1767; David Hume (1711-1776) (Of the Original Contract, 1748; (On Money), 1752; (On Interest);(Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth), 1754; (On the Balance of Trade); (Selected Essays); Jeremy Bentham (Defence of Usury), 1787; St. George Tucker (Blackstone's Commentaries with notes (...), 1803; David Ricardo (1772-1823) (The principles of political economy and taxation), 1815; James Kent (Commentaries on American Law), 1826.

On 1776 Adam Smith (1723-90) published his masterpiece An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which marked the begining of Classical Economics and will be subject of a separate chapter in this article.

François Quesnay and the Physiocrats

François Quesnay, 1694-1774.

François Quesnay is considered to be the father of the Physiocrats.

Quesnay opposed the mercantilist doctrines of Colbert believing that they concentrated too much on propping up industry and commerce rather than agriculture.

Quesnay theory began with the axiom that "agriculture is the only source of produit net" (net product, or surplus of output above cost). He believed that manufacturing and commerce were "sterile" as the value of their output was equal to the value of their inputs. Only land, he said, produced more than went into it. Quesnay observed that the wealth of a nation lies in the size of its net product.

Influenced by the advocates of laissez-faire, Quesnay wished to see many of the Medieval rules governing agricultural production lifted for the economy to find its "natural state". The natural state of the economy was the balanced circular flow of income between economic sectors. Quesnay, a physician in Louis XV's court, saw analogies to the circulation of human blood and the homeostasis of a body.

Quesnay emphazised the distinction between the ordre naturel (nature's order) and the ordre positif (positive, i.e. human-idealized, order). A good government, Quesnay argued, should follow a laissez-faire policy so that the ordre naturel could emerge.

Mirabeau (1760, 1763), Mercier de la Riviere(1767) and DuPont de Nemours (1767) commentaries of Quenay's articles gave Quesnay's ideas a more systematic feel.

The Physiocrats

The Physiocrats were a group of French Enlightenment thinkers of the 1760s that followed François Quesnay's ideas. The founding document of "Physiocratic doctrine" was Quesnay's Tableau Économique (1759) .

This circle included the Marquis de Mirabeau, Mercier de la Rivière, Dupont de Nemours, La Trosne, the Abbé Baudeau and a handful of others. To their contemporaries, they were known simply as the économistes.

The cornerstone of the Physiocratic doctrine was François Quesnay's (1759, 1766) axiom that "only agriculture yielded a surplus", called produit net (net product). Manufacturing, the Physiocrats argued, took up as much value as inputs into production as it created in output, and consequently created no net product.

The Physiocrats believed that the wealth of a nation lies not in its stocks of gold and silver, but rather in the size of its net product, going against the prevailing mercantilists' theories.

Believing that industries cannot generate any produit net, the Physiocrats argued that the old Colbertiste policies of encouraging commercial and industrial corporations was wrong-headed. Government policy, if any, should be geared to maximizing the value and output of the agricultural sector.

They defended a laissez-faire attitude. They called for the removal of restrictions on internal trade and labor migration, the abolition of the corvée, the removal of state-sponsored monopolies and trading privileges, the dismantling of the guild system, etc.

The Physiocrats defended their "single tax" on landed property -- l'impôt unique. Mirabeau (1760) laid out the logic of its defense arguing that if only land creates a surplus, all taxes represent just a transfer of money form one sector to another.

David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment

David Hume (1711-1776.)

David Hume was one of the most important figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and a friend of Adam Smith. Hume's contributions to economics are found mostly in his Political Discourses (1752), incorporated into his Essays (1758).

Hume opposed Mercantilism. He defended that wealth of a was measured by the stock of commodities of a nation, not its stock of money.

He was also one of the creators of the Quantity Theory and the neutrality of money ("It is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy", Of Money, 1752.

The "Scottish Enlightenment" (1740-1790)

The "Scottish Enlightenment" stretched roughly from 1740 to 1790. Many of its protagonists were academics. Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid and John Millar were professors at the University of Glasgow. Adam Ferguson, Dugald Stewart and William Robertson were at the University of Edinburgh. Some important figures outside the academy included Lord Kames, Sir James Steuart, Dr. James Anderson and, last but not least, David Hume.

The major areas of concern for Scottish philosophers were moral philosophy, history and economics. David Hume leaded the way in all three.

The Scottish Enlightenment came to an end in the early 1800s.

Ferdinando Galiani and the Italian Tradition

Ferdinando Galiani, 1728-1787

Ferdinando Galiani was one of the leaders of the "Neapolitan Enlightenment" and the creator the Italian utilitarian tradition. Living in France from 1759 to 1769, Galiani knew many French economists and opposed the Physiocrat doctrine

Galiani rejected most of the Physiocratic analysis, in particular its "land theory of value".

Is his book Della Moneta (1751) Galiani introduced an alternative theory of value based of utility and scarcity and which made him the "Grandfather of the Marginalist Revolution".

In his book Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (1770) he provided a quite modern analysis of balance of payments.

Denis Diderot was one of his strongest supporters and followers.

The Italian Tradition

The Italian Tradition , or Italian Utilitarian Tradition begins in the XVII century when Ferdinando Galiani boke form the mainstream Enlightenment economic thinking.

Galiani initiated the two first branches which formed the "Italian tradition" in economics: the analysis of government as an economic entity and a utility-based theory of natural value. Government, he argued, is an important entity in any economy. It can, via its laws and fiscal policies, influence the economy and society for good and evil. This line of reasoning was closer to the French Neo-Colbertistes and German Neo-Cameralists.

The Italians contributed much for the construction of the Marginalist Revolution. The bulk of the Lausanne School came from Italy -- Vilfredo Pareto, Enrico Barone, Giovanni Antonelli, Pasquale Boninsegni, etc. Some economists, such as Henry Schultz, preferred to call it simply the "Italian School". The Neoclassical economist Maffeo Pantaleoni, the Italian "Marshallian", can be considered part of this group.

The economic theory of the State was an Italian concern and passed through several stages. First it was explicitly utilitarian. Cesar Beccaria, and Pietro Verri focused their analysis on the impact of the State and fiscal policy on the economy. The Italians found in the notion of utility - or "happiness" -- a criteria by which to evaluate policy. During the XIX Century by the works of Francesco Ferrara, Antonio de Viti de Marco, Ugo Mazzola, Luigi Einaudi, Pareto, Barone, Pantaleoni and others, the State began being analyzed as an economic entity itself. This involved examining the government as both a "productive" agent (i.e. a producer of collective goods -- which are also inputs into private production) as well as an "optimizing" agent (i.e. a "revenue-maximizer").

The third important branch of Italian economics was initiated by Piero Sraffa in 1960, with the "Classical" Neo-Ricardian counter-revolution".

Social Philosophers and Commentators

For an extesive analysis on this subject, view Social Philosophers and Commentators at the History Of Economic Thought Website

• Jean Bodin (1530-1596) (or Baudin or Bodinus) was a XVI century French, natural law philosopher and precursor of Mecantilism. Bodin put forth what is generally acknowledged as one of the first statements of the Quantity Theory of Money, detailing the relationship between price levels and the money supply, generally speaking.

• Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1642) was an English empiricist philosopher and originator of the modern "positivist" view of science, as opposed to the Aristotlean approach to knowledge of the Scholastics. Argued for grounding of "natural law" doctrines in methodological individualism.

• Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was among the first to attempt to apply Newtonian analogies to political, social, economic and moral behavior. Conceived of the concepts of "social laws" and a natural "social equilibrium" as the balance of opposing forces, that were later taken up by the Physiocrats.

The Classicals

Adam Smith

Adam Smith published on 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the famous book that established economics as an autonomous subject and launched the economic doctrine of free enterprise.

In his book Smith examined in detail the consequences of economic freedom. It covered such concepts as the role of self-interest, the division of labor, the function of markets, and the international implications of a laissez-faire economy, with public welfare, on his view, coming as a by-product.

Smith laid an intellectual framework that explained the free market that still holds true today. His expression "the invisible hand,"' which he used to demonstrate how self-interest guides the most efficient use of resources in a nation's economy became world-wide known.

The Classical School ("Ricardians")

Written during the gentle era of the Enlightenment - and on the same year the Mercantilist economic policies of the British state had led to a rebelion in America, where the colonists established a home-grown liberal republican government more-or-less dedicated to the laissez-faire and free trade, in line with the Wealth of Nations - Smith's book failed to anticipate the economic and social upheavals that industrial era was about to unleash; furthermore, it was a muddled and inconsistent book.

Only 13 years after its publication the French court was bankupt, the French people took to the streets, beheaded their king and approved a "Declaration of the Rights of Man". Napoleon would give Europe a bloodbath for the next 25 years. The French Revolution would change the World.

New explanations for the social phenomena taking place became necessary. Three names emerged to try and explain them: Jean-Baptiste Say, Robert Malthus and David Ricardo. They all had different visions for political economy after Smith. Say (1803) wanted to take it back towards the French-Italian demand-and-supply tradition. Malthus (1798, 1820) wanted to add a whole new emphasis, away from the obsessive intricacies of "value" and towards a more macroeconomic (and "dynamic") perspective. Ricardo (1817) wanted to do Smith all over again, but to do it properly this time.

David Ricardo turned out to be the most successful and influential. His 1817 treatise On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation Ricardo took economics to a high degree of theoretical sophistication. Ricardo's theory, the most clearly and consistently formalized of them all, became the Classical system.

Many economists continued working in the Say tradition, notably Rau and the French Liberal School. Say's approach, disputing the labor theory of value and focusing on supply-and-demand instead, was also advocated by a small group of economists at Oxford and Dublin. The publication of John Stuart Mill The Principles of Political Economy: with some of their applications to social philosophy,(1848) textbook, restating the Ricardian Classical doctrines fully and explicitly settled the controversy. Ricardo's system, however, was improved very little by his followers. Perhaps only Karl Marx (1867-94) added insights of importance.

By 1860 the Classical School became under attack simultaneously by , Thomas Cliffe-Leslie the and English Historicists, accompanied, by the German Historical School. The Victorian "sages", Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, criticized the Classical economists in the popular press.

A major blow to the Classical Ricardian School came with the Marginalist Revolution led by William Stanley Jevons (1871), Carl Menger and Leon Walras (1874), which provided a clear alternative. The Classical Ricardian system did not last long beyond that. Some reconciliation between the two theories was discussed by Alfred Marshall (1890). Other more radical Marginalists, notably Edwin Cannan (1893), concluded that there was nothing in Classical political economy worth saving.

Neoclassical Schools (1871-today)

The Marginalist Revolution

Marginalist Revolution was the name given to a movement which took place (almost) simultaneouly and independently during the end of the XIX century led by a series of works which lay the foundation for a new concept of Economics and which contributed to transform it into an exact science.

This programatic goal -- to transform Economics into an exact science -- find in the books of Carl Menger (1871) William Stanley Jevons (1871) and Léon Walras (1874) its decisive moments and it is exactly to designate this multiple explosion the that name "Marginalist Revolution" has been coined.

History

Adam Smith (1776), David Ricardo (1817) and the Classicals (which adopted a cost of production theory of value) struggled to understand what came to be called the paradox of "value in use" versus "value in exchange.", usually exemplified as the "paradox of diamond and water". Water is essential, diamonds are frivoulous. But the price of diamonds is far higher than that of water. Smith and the Classical School had failed to distinguish between "total utility" and "marginal utility". The elaboration of this insight transformed economics in the late nineteenth century, and the fruits of the marginalist revolution continue to set the basic framework for contemporary microeconomics.

The creation of the Theory of Marginal Utility

The creation of the marginal utility's concept, which flourished during the end of the XIX century, brought the answer to the paradox and has been the theoretical basis for the economic analysis of demand.

The value of marginal utility is defined as "the additional utility perceived by the consumer by the addition of one extra unit of a good".

For example: a hungry consumer finds an enourmous utilitity by eating a first loaf of bread. This utility declines as he keeps eating more units. The 10th loaf of bread represents for him an utility far smaller than the first one. And the 100th loaf might represent no utility at all.

The creators of the concept

Demand analysis became possible by the theory of utility, the mathematical tools of which were first developed by Hermann Heinrich Gossen (1810-1858) in Germany. However, due to its abstract and mathematical nature, Gossen's work was dismissed by the all- powerful German Historical School; his work was only uncovered and graciously acknowledged by Jevons in 1878. Grossen is considered a pro-marginalist.

Almost simultaneously Carl Menger in Austria (1871), Léon Walras in France (1874-77) e William Stanley Jevons in England (1871) published their works and became the fathers of the Marginalist Revolution.

Later Alfred Marshal in England, on his book Principles of Economics (1890), greatly extended the concept and recognized that prices are determined simultaneoulsy by factors of cost and factors of demand. Marshall's analysis also analyses the complexes phenomena ocurring in a price system, with various goods interacting among themselves and affecting each other's prices.

Carl Menger founded the Austrian School (a.k.a Viena School), which was later joined by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek; Léon Walras worked with the Lausanne School while William Stanley Jevons led the Anglo-American Marginalists.

Anglo-American Neoclassicism (1871-Today)

Anglo-American Marginalists ("Jevonians")

The Anglo-American Marginalists ("Jevonians") refer to early English and American writers between the 1870s and the 1930s who strayed from the Marshallian and Institutionalist schools. Many could thus be deemed "followers" of W.S. Jevons; they adopted the "mathematical" method of reasoning and/or the radical "subjectivism" inherent in Jevons's revolutionary marginalism.

Clark and the American Apologists

John Bates Clark (1847-1938) is best known for developing the "marginal productivity" concept and the "product exhaustion" thesis behind the Marginal Productivity Theory of Distribution, which he was the first to develop in 1889. He also developed the theory of marginal utility-based demand independently in 1885. As one of few American economists of the Marginalist school and a prominent apologist for the capitalist system, John Bates Clark was a great opponent of the Institutionalist School.

The "American Apologists" is the term used to describe late XIX Century and early XX Century American arch-conservative economists and social scientists. Theoretically they hoovered between Classical and Neoclassical economic theory; they distinguished themselves in their applied work and policy stance. The most important American Universities system were dominated by strict apologists for the status quo. Simon Newcomb at Johns Hopkins, John Bates Clark at Columbia, J. Laurence Laughlin at Chicago, Charles Dunbar and Frank Taussig at Harvard, Arthur T. Hadley and William Graham Sumner at Yale, all defendeded the new industrial age and condemn the unions and populist causes.

Alfred Marshall and The Cambridge Neoclassicals ("Marshallians")

The Marshalians was a group inspired on the work of Alfred Marshall which relied on practical, intuitive arguments rather than mathematical formalism, taking into account items such as historical time, institutional and industrial structure and real world phenomena, such as uncertainty, money and business cycles. Their main focus was on representative conditions. Their work emphasised partial market equilibrium, couching their arguments in terms of "representative" agents, firms, etc. rather than grand, idealized, multi-market general equilibrium systems.

London School of Economics (LSE) and Robbins

The London School of Economics and Political Science was set up as in 1895 by Sidney J. Webb and Beatrice Potter Webb, fabian socialists, but its early appointments were more conservative: W.A.S. Hewins (later a Tory MP) was its first director, Edwin Cannan, was to head the economics department, the technocratic Arthur L. Bowley headed statistics and liberal theorists L.T. Hobhouse headed sociology.

The L.S.E. from the very beginning aimed at being an academic teaching-and-research powerhouse. It was one of the group of "new universities" (like M.I.T., Johns Hopkins, Chicago, etc.) founded at the turn of century which eschewed the Oxbridge-Ivy League "gentlemanly education" approach in favor of a more serious academic and technical approach, akin to the Central European model. Like other "new universities", the L.S.E. was keen on raising its profile via academic research.

Lord Lionel C. Robbins, 1898-1984.

Lord Robbins was one Englishman who was not a Marshallian but rather a follower of Jevons and Wicksteed. He was one the few economists in England who cared to read the Continental European economists - Walras, Pareto, Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser and Wicksell. As a result of his Jevonian-Lausanne-Austrian-Swedish influence, Robbins helped to move Anglo-Saxon economics off its Marshallian rails and onto Continental ones.

His tools were the London School of Economics and a famous 1932 essay on economic methodology. He appointed Friedrich A. von Hayek, who in turn bred a new generation of English-speaking "continentals" such as Hicks, Lerner, Kaldor and Scitovsky.

The Chicago School and Knight

The "Chicago School" is perhaps one of the better known American "schools" of economics. The term "Chicago School" refers to the approach of the members of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago (founded by the oil magnate John D. Rockfeller) over the past century. Also the term "Chicago School" may be associated with a brand of economics which adheres strictly to Neoclassical price theory in its economic analysis, "free market" libertarianism in much of its policy and a methodology relatively averse to much mathematical formalism. and willing to forego careful general equilibrium reasoning It favors results-oriented partial equilibrium analysis.

In recent years, the "Chicago School" has been associated with "economic imperialism", i.e. the application of economic reasoning to areas traditionally considered the prerogative of other fields such as political science, legal theory, history and sociology.

The "Chicago School" has had various phases with quite different characteristics. At present, under the term "Chicago School" we can identify various schools of thought: Monetarism in the 1960s, New Classical/Real Business Cycle macroeconomics from the 1970s until today, and more recently, the New Institutionalism, New Economic History and Law-and-Economics.

Frank H. Knight, 1885-1972.

Frank H. Knight, the "Grand Old Man" of Chicago, (irreducibly Neoclassical) was one of the century's the deepest thinker and scholar American economics has produced. With Jacob Viner, Knight presided over the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago from the 1920s to the late 1940s.

His famous dissertation Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (1921), where he made made the distinction between "risk" (randomness with knowable probabilities) and "uncertainty" (randomness with unkowable probabilities)is one of the most interesting reads in economics even today.

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