ABSTRACT
If one looks at standard history of economics courses one would probably find a subset of the same authors covered-the pre-modern mercantilists and physiocrates, the classics Smith and Ricardo, the marginalist revolution, the macroeconomic revolution of the 1930s, and finally the general equilibrium theory. The authors looked at such standard textbooks comprise the canon of the history of economics. Most of the other authors are relegated to footnotes or into chapters on interesting side paths such as, for example, Karl Marx. The history is presented as if there were a straight road from earlier authors to later ones, as if each author had learned from his predecessors. This is somehow true. In Smith we can read in which way his theory is different from that of the mercantilists and physiocrates. Karl Marx extends this story to Smith and Ricardo. Marshall called himself a neo-classic precisely because he thought that he could build on some of Ricardo’s principles. These authors laid open what they had learned from earlier theories.
