From Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill: Samuel Hollander and the classical economists

No historian of economic thought has raised as much controversy and been the topic of as much debate, even acrimonious debate, as has Samuel Hollander. Reactions to the various installments of his series on the classical economists have ranged from Lionel Robbins's high praise of the Smith and Ricardo books as an "answer to a prayer" to Mark Blaug's condemnation of the book on Mill as "a very bad book indeed" (Robbins 1998: 1 0; Blaug 1986). Assessing such a body of work is a daunting task indeed.