Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis

Selected Essays

Steven G. Medema, Anthony M. C. Waterman

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107029934
• eBook ISBN: 9781316056233
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

As one of the most famous economists of the twentieth century, Paul Anthony Samuelson revolutionized many branches of economic theory. As a diligent student of his predecessors, he reconstructed their economic analyses in the mathematical idiom he pioneered. Out of Samuelson's more than eighty articles, essays, and memoirs, the editors of this collection have selected seventeen. Twelve are mathematical reconstructions of some of the most famous work in the history of economic thought - work by David Hume, François Quesnay, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and others. One is a methodological essay defending the Whig history that he was sometimes accused of promulgating; two deal with the achievements of Joseph Schumpeter and Denis Robertson; and two review theoretical developments of his own time: Keynesian economics and monopolistic competition. The collection provides readers with a sense of the depth and breadth of Samuelson's contributions to the study of the history of economics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Historiography
• Part II Before Adam Smith
• Part III Wealth of Nations and the “Canonical Classical Model”
• Part IV David Ricardo
• Part V Johann Heinrich von Thünen
• Part VI Karl Marx
• Part VII Post-“Classical” Political Economy
• Part VIII Retrospectives on Early Modern Economists
• Part IX Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Economics
• Samuelson’s Publications in the History of Economic Thought
• Index