ABSTRACT
Introduction My theme in this book is the capacity of themethods of the Classical political economists, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and their critic, Karl Marx, to reveal the self-organizing character of the capitalist economy regarded as a complex, adaptive, non-equilibrium system. From one point of view this is an exercise in anachronism, since the lan-
guage of complex systems theory and its application to economic problems is only about forty years old, and it is implausible to claim that Smith or Ricardo or Marx thought about the problems of the economy using the conceptual tools of complexity science. On the other hand, I will argue that the language and vision of the Classical political economists incorporates many insights of contemporary complex systems theory. There are also indirect but important intellectual pathways that connect the Classical political economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the twentieth century emergence of complexity science. I also will argue that complexity theory sheds some light on the extraordinary effectiveness of the Classical political economists’ methods and the depth of their analytical results. I believe that contemporary economists still have much to learn from these methods and results about the capitalist economy and its evolution.
