Introduction

In the middle of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, Karl Marx suddenly strode onto the scene with talk of exploitation and alienation among the industrial workers, and plunged economics into a new dark age. The rise of socialism would be the biggest challenge Smithian capitalism would face over the next century. The "marginal" revolution gave new life to main character, the invisible-hand model of Adam Smith. But the biggest blow to Adam Smith's world of free-market capitalism came with the 1929 crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s. By adopting a stable monetary policy, the self-regulating market economy of Adam Smith could once again flourish. Historically, there have been two approaches to writing about the lives and ideas of economists: the pendulum and the totem pole. Historically, centrally planned socialist regimes have vastly underperformed the market economies. The story of economics has been greatly enhanced by some excellent biographies published lately.