Preface

TL;DRAbstract

The history of economic theory is also the history of its increasing fragmentation. The remarkable unity of the subject to be found in Ricardo's Principles, the masterpiece of classical political economy, has vanished in the course of time. The classical system, built upon François Quesnay's physiocratic foundations, already contained the seeds of divergence and gave birth to alternative grand systems. Adam Smith's emphasis on behaviour and exchange favoured the development of neoclassical economics, as first comprehensively systematized by William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall and Carl Menger. David Ricardo started from the social process of production to tackle the fundamental problems of value and distribution. His labour theory of value and his surplus principle of distribution became parts of a fundamental critique of capitalism within the wider framework of the economic theory of socialism, sketched by the early French socialists and by Karl Marx and Friedrich Enge

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