Economics

The Social Science Encyclopedia, Second Edition

In the draft of the introduction to his monumental study of the history of economic analysis, Joseph Schumpeter (1954) writes as follows:

Few contemporary economists view their subject as stretching back continuously to Graeco-Roman civilizations, and some would regard a close association with history or philosophy as unnecessary, if not positively undesirable.

Yet Schumpeter’s account takes up nearly 200 pages before reaching Adam Smith’s (1776) The Wealth of Nations, which is where economics began according to a vulgar view.

There is no great contradiction here. A reading of Schumpeter shows that he, as much as any other commentator, recognizes that the study of economic questions underwent radical changes of method, and an accelerated pace of development, in the late eighteenth century. Yet contemporary historians of economic thought agree with Schumpeter in not attributing the beginning of modern economics to the European.........

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