ABSTRACT
As is well known from the field of economic history, the concept of revolution is difficult to transfer from its origins in politics to other fields of social science. Its essence is unexpected speed of change, and this requires a judgement of speed in the context of a longer perspective of historical change, the choice of which is likely to be debatable in the extreme. Leaving the judgemental issue aside for the moment, one could characterize the history of our subject in terms of a series of ‘revolutions’, very broadly defined, as follows. Economics as we know it began with what might be called the ‘Smithian revolution’ against the established body of doctrines generically described as ‘mercantilism’, a revolution which changed ideas on the nature and sources of the wealth of nations and the policies required to promote the growth of what we now call ‘affluence’. The Ricardian revolution turned the attention of economists from concern with national wealth and its growth to the distribution of income among social classes and the interactions of growth and income distribution. The marginalist revolution of the 1870s essentially introduced a new and superior analytical technology for dealing with Ricardo’s distribution problem, in the process gradually depriving Ricardian economics of its social content; hence, the results of that revolution have been described as neo-Ricardian or more commonly neo-classical economics.
