The Making of Modern Economics: The Lives and Ideas of the Great Thinkers

This bold history of economics tells the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer. Unlike other economics histories, 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, while Alfred Marshall, Irving Fisher, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman, among others, remodeled and improved upon Smithian economics. Highlights include humorous anecdotes and exciting new revelations about the lives of the great economists.