As the world grapples with increased globalization and technological change, Friedrich List’s work appears more relevant than ever before. His theory of "productive powers" and his argument for protecting infant industries give us a valuable way of looking at innovation systems, winners and losers in international trade, and the current shift towards economic and political nationalism. Comprising fifteen specially commissioned chapters from a range of international scholars, this book explores many aspects of List’s economic thought, including industrial development, political economy, the economics of education, infrastructure and catching-up processes in Asian economies. This volume will be illuminating reading for advanced students and researchers in the history of economic thought, economic history, economic policy and international trade.

Friedrich List (1789-1846) was a prophet of social market economy, national economy and the infant-industry theory. In this comprehensive biography the international influence and reception of List’s theories is presented together with his extraordinary vita. List was a notable early advocate of economic integration of the many separate states of 19th century Germany. His basic theory is that of productive resources and the need to protect infant industries until they have matured enough to stand alone. He is recognized as a visionary economist with social responsibility and as an influential railway pioneer. He was a liberal and a democrat who promoted an extended representative democracy, including respect for human rights and civil liberties, to accompany industrial development. His highly influential main work “The National System of Political Economy” has been translated into many languages. Eugen Wendler, the renowned author and List expert, not only builds upon his many years of research, but also discusses several new sources. This richly illustrated book is as informative as it is well written.

This reader in the history of economic thought challenges the assumption that today’s prevailing economic theories are always the most appropriate ones. As Leland Yeager has pointed out, unlike the scientists of the natural sciences, economists provide their ideas largely to politicians and political appointees who have rather different incentives that might prevent them from choosing the best economic theory. In this book, the life and work of each of the founders of economics is examined by the best available expert on that founding figure. These contributors present rather novel and certainly not mainstream interpretations of the founders of modern economics. The primary theme concerns the development of economic thought as this emerged in the various continental traditions including the Islamic tradition. These continental traditions differed substantially, both substantively and methodologically, from the Anglo-Saxon orientation that has been dominant in the last century for example in the study of public finance or the very construct of the state itself. This books maps the various channels of continental economics, particularly from the late-18th through the early-20th centuries, explaining and demonstrating the underlying unity amid the surface diversity. In particular, the book emphasizes the writings of John Stuart Mill, his predecessor David Ricardo and his follower Jeremy Bentham; the theory of Marginalism by von Thünen, Cournot, and Gossen; the legacy of Karl Marx; the innovations in developmental economics by Friedrich List; the economic and monetary contributions and “struggle of escape” by John Maynard Keynes; the formidable theory in public finance and economics by Joseph Schumpeter; a reinterpretation of Alfred Marshall; Léon Walras, Heinrich von Stackelberg, Knut Wicksell, Werner Sombart, and Friedrich August von Hayek are each dealt with in their own right.

At a time when critiques of free trade policies are gaining currency, The Neomercantilists helps make sense of the protectionist turn, providing the first intellectual history of the genealogy of neomercantilism. Eric Helleiner identifies many pioneers of this ideology between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries who backed strategic protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state wealth and power. They included not just the famous Friedrich List, but also numerous lesser-known thinkers, many of whom came from outside of the West. Helleiner's novel emphasis on neomercantilism's diverse origins challenges traditional Western-centric understandings of its history. It illuminates neglected local intellectual traditions and international flows of ideas that gave rise to distinctive varieties of the ideology around the globe, including in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. This rich history left enduring intellectual legacies, including in the two dominant powers of the contemporary world economy: China and the United States. The result is an exceptional study of a set of profoundly influential economic ideas. While rooted in the past, it sheds light on the present moment. The Neomercantilists shows how we might construct more global approaches to the study of international political economy and intellectual history, devoting attention to thinkers from across the world, and to the cross-border circulation of thought.

This book provides an overview or an introduction to the development of economic thought from the time of the early Greek and Roman writers to the mid-20th century. It provides a basic, no frills account of how economic ideas which were first cited by the early philosophers were later refined by the writings of the medieval schoolmen and still later by the contributions of the mercantilists and physiocrats. All these ideas were collected and synthesized by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations which provided the basis for economics as a formal subject of inquiry. From Smith’s magnum opus emerged the works of the classical economists, most notably, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. Their work was not left unchallenged by the Utopian Socialists, the Associationists, and other social reformers and most importantly by Karl Marx. Nevertheless, classical economics was not to be denied thanks to Alfred Marshall who succeeded in fusing the Austrians’ concept of utility on the demand side with the classicists’ cost of production on the supply side of the market to provide a new theory of value. He gave new life to the classicists with his Neo-Classicism, the basis for microeconomics, to be followed fifty years later by Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and the ushering in of macroeconomics.

Humanity and Nature in Economic Thought: Searching for the Organic Origins of the Economy argues that organic elements seen as incompatible with rational homo economicus have been left out of, or downplayed in, mainstream histories of economic thought. The chapters show that organic aspects (that is, aspects related to sensitive, cognitive or social human qualities) were present in the economic ideas of a wide range of important thinkers including Hume, Smith, Malthus, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, Hayek and the Polanyi brothers. Moreover, the contributors to this thought-provoking volume reveal in turn that these aspects were crucial to how these key figures thought about the economy. This stimulating collection of essays will be of interest to advanced students and scholars of the history of economic thought, economic philosophy, heterodox economics, moral philosophy and intellectual history.

This book provides an overview of 200 years of German economic thought from the eighteenth century to the Social Market.

Michael Polanyi is most famous for his work in chemistry and the philosophy of science, but in the 1930s and 1940s he made an important contribution to economics. Drawing on rich archival materials on Polanyi and his correspondents, Gábor Biró explores their competing worldviews and their struggles to popularise their visions of the economy, economic expertise and democracy. Special focus is given to Polanyi’s pioneering economics film and postmodern ideas. This volume will be of interest to advanced students and researchers of the history of economics, philosophy of science, and science and technology studies.