histofthought1

viiiEconomic thought before Adam SmithRicardo 'classical economics' by stressing the importance of the marginal unitas compared to whole classes of goods. Then it was on to Alfred Marshall, whosagely integrated Ricardian cost theory with the supposedly one-sided Austrian-Jevonianemphasis on demand and utility, to create modern neoclassicaleconomics. Karl Marx could scarcely be ignored, and so he was treated in achapter as an aberrant Ricardian. And so the historian could polish off his storyby dealing with four or five Great Figures, each of whom, with the exception ofMarx, contributed more building blocks toward the unbroken progress of economicscience, essentially a story ofever onward and upward into the light. 3In the post-World War II years, Keynes of course was added to the Pantheon,providing a new culminating chapter in the progress and developmentof the science. Keynes, beloved student of the great Marshall, realized thatthe old man had left out what would later be called 'macroeconomics' in hisexclusive emphasis on the micro. And so Keynes added macro, concentratingon the study and explanation of unemployment, a phenomenon which everyonebefore Keynes had unaccountably left out of the economic picture, or hadconveniently swept under the rug by blithely 'assuming full employment'.Since then, the dominant paradigm has been largely sustained, althoughmatters have recently become rather cloudy. For one thing, this kind of GreatMan ever-upward history requires occasional new final chapters. Keynes'sGeneral Theory, published in 1936, is now almost sixty years old; surelythere must be a Great Man for a final chapter? But who? For a while,Schumpeter, with his modern and seemingly realistic stress on 'innovation',had a run, but this trend came a cropper, perhaps on the realization thatSchumpeter's fundamental work (or 'vision', as he himself perceptively putit) was written more than two decades before the General Theory. The yearssince the 1950s have been murky; and it is difficult to force a return to theonce-forgotten Walras into the Procrustean bed of continual progress.My own view of the grave deficiency of the Few Great Men approach hasbeen greatly influenced by the work of two splendid historians of thought.One is my own dissertation mentor Joseph Dorfman, whose unparalleledmulti-volume work on the history of American economic thought demonstratedconclusively how important allegedly 'lesser' figures are in any movementof ideas. In the first place, the stuff of history is left out by omittingthese figures, and history is therefore falsified by selecting and worrying overa few scattered texts to constitute The History of Thought. Second, a largenumber of the supposedly secondary figures contributed a great deal to thedevelopment of thought, in some ways more than the few peak thinkers.Hence, important features of economic thought get omitted, and the developedtheory is made paltry and barren as well as lifeless.Furthermore, the cut-and-thrust of history itself, the context of the ideasand movements, how people influenced each other, and how they reacted to