Introduction Two schemes for ordering approaches to the history of

Two schemes for ordering approaches to the history of economic thought The history of economic thought is not the uncritical repetition of what others have said, but the attempt to order the ideas according to the contribution made to economic theory, according to the relationship of the theoretical contribution to general history and, in particular, in relation to the political goal which the theory helps to defend. Accordingly, the historian of economic thought can pursue one or a combination of three approaches, which we described in the Introduction to the earlier book Great Economic Thinkers from Antiquity to the Historical School (Schefold 2016c) and, more extensively, in Schefold (2016b). In the first book, we were primarily concerned with relativistic and political approaches, whereas the endeavour to understand and reconstruct analytical developments predominates here.