Economics Broadly Considered by Biddle, Jeff E.; Davis, John B; Medema, Steven G;

Short description:

Warren J. Samuels has been a prominent figure in the study of economics in the twentieth century. This book brings together essays by leading scholars in the areas of economics in which Samuels has made his most important contributions.

Long description:

Warren J. Samuels has been a prominent figure in the study of economics in the twentieth century. This book brings together essays by leading scholars in the areas of economics in which Samuels has made his most important contributions: the history of economic thought, economic methodology, and institutional and post-Keynesian economics.

This work is designed to give the reader a sense of the breadth and possibilities of economics. The essays, all published here for the first time, investigate issues such as:

• The institutional structures that shape economic activity and performance.


• The variety of approaches to economic analysis. 


• The importance of the history of the discipline both inherently and for the study of economics in the modern age.

With essays from leading scholars, collected and introduced by some of the most eminent authorities in the field, the work is a formidable volume, and one fit to honor one of the most renowned economists of our age.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Economics broadly considered: a glance at Warren J. Samuels’ contributions to economics PART I The history of economic thought 1 The training of the economist in antiquity: the “mirror for princes” tradition in Alcibiades Major and Aquinas’ On Kingship 2 A quintessential (ahistorical) Tableau Économique: to sum up Pre-and Post-Smith classical paradigms 3 Frank Knight as institutional economist 4 From divergence to convergence: Irving Fisher and John R. Commons as champions of monetary reforms 5 E.H. Chamberlin: oligopoly and oligopolistic interdependence: the issue of space 6 Two phases of Kuznets’s interest in Schumpeter 7 The AEA and the radical challenge to American social Science PART II Aspects of economic method 8 On the credentials of methodological pluralism 9 Some practical aspects of pluralism in economics 10 What econometrics can and cannot tell us about historical actors: brewing, betting and rationality in London, 1822–44 PART III The legal-economic nexus 11 Putting the “political” back into political economy 12 Output categories for a comparative institutional approach to law and economics 13 On the changing nature of the public utility concept: a retrospective and prospective assessment PART IV Aspects of institutional and Post Keynesian economics 14 The institutional economics of Nobel Prize winners 15 J. Fagg Foster’s theory of instrumental value 16 Monetary policy in the twenty-first century in the light of the debate between Chartalism and Monetarism 17 1935 where we were—where we are 2000