Here is a bold new history of economics, the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer. Unlike other histories of economics, Mark Skousen's book provides a running plot with a singular heroic figure, Adam Smith, at the center of the discipline. Skousen unites the great thinkers by ranking them for or against Adam Smith and his "system of natural liberty". He shows how Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and even laissez-faire disciples Robert Malthus and David Ricardo detracted from Adam Smith's classical model of democratic capitalism during periods of economic failure and upheaval, while Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, among others, remodeled and improved upon Smithian economics as the world economy recovered and prospered.
Highlights include exciting new revelations about the lives of the great economists, provocative sidelights, humorous anecdotes, and even musical selections reflecting the spirit of each major economist.
