ABSTRACT
Newton, famously and possibly tongue-in-cheek, declared that if he saw far it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Something of the sort must be true of all sciences, including economics, no matter what we think of the stature of our forebears. Our subject is where it is largely because of its history. It is difficult to see, for example, how modern general equilibrium theory could have come about without the ‘founding fathers’ (Chapter 10) or modern welfare economics without utilitarianism (Chapter 7).
