[Introduction and Plan]

By History of Economic Analysis I mean the history of the intellectual efforts that men have made in order to understand economic phenomena or, which comes to the same thing, the history of the analytic or scientific aspects of economic thought. Part ii of this book will describe the history of those efforts from the earliest discernible beginnings up to and including the last two or three decades of the eighteenth century. Part iii will go on through the period that may be described, though only very roughly, as the period of the English ‘classics’—to about the early 1870's. Part iv will present an account of the fortunes of analytic or scientific economics from (speaking again very roughly) the end of the ‘classic’ period to the First World War, though the history of some topics will, for the sake of convenience, be carried to the present time. These three Parts constitute the bulk of the book and embody the bulk of the research that went into it. Part v is merely a sketch of modern developments, relieved of some of its cargo by the anticipations in Part iv that have been just mentioned, and aims at nothing more ambitious than helping the reader to understand how modern work links up with the work of the past.