ABSTRACT
This book offers the first history of the Russian synthesis. The theoretical context in which this synthesis took shape has been outlined in the first part of this book. After the basic concept of value and prices in Russian economic thought was defined (Chapter 1), it has been shown that in the 1870s Ziber already provided the basis for an interpretation of a classical theory of value embedding the legacies of both Ricardo and Marx (Chapter 2). It has further been argued that this only delayed the reception of marginalism in Russia, which entered the country only in the 1890s, first in its Austrian version, then in the mathematical Walrasian version. It has been shown that the marginalist theories were perceived as theories of exchange only and not as theories of production (Chapter 3). Once all constituting parts were laid down, the history of the Russian synthesis is carefully reconstructed in the second part of this book (Chapters 4 and 5 for Tugan-Baranovsky; Chapter 6 for Dmitriev, Bortkiewicz, Slutsky – and others – Shaposhnikov and Yurovsky).
