ABSTRACT
Jan Toporowski’s Theories of Financial Disturbances poses enormous difficulties for the reader. Some of this difficulty is simply the nature of the project which might be viewed in part as a translation from the mathematics in which the modern economic discussion of financial instability is found. This is a short book expounding economic thinking by literally dozens of subtle economists’ thoughts on financial instability in texts ranging from François Quesnay in the middle of the eighteenth century through Robert Schiller of today. Adam Smith and the classical economists get two chapters. Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, Ralph Hawtrey, Irving Fisher and Hyman Minksy get a chapter each. Maynard Keynes gets two chapters. The work of Marek Breit, Michal Kalecki and Josef Steindl is considered together ‘in the shadow of Keynes’. The exposition is often in terms of other economists, Knut Wicksell, F.A. Hayek, Robert Lucas, whose work is assumed to be known.
