Paul Samuelson on the History of Economic Analysis: Selected Essays(Historical Perspectives on Modern 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:
1. Introduction; 2. Out of the closet: a program for the Whig history of economic science; 3. A corrected version of Hume's equilibrating mechanism for international trade; 4. Quesnay's tableau économique as a theorist would formulate it today; 5. The canonical classical model of political economy; 6. A modern theorist's vindication of Adam Smith; 7. A modern treatment of the Ricardian economy: the pricing of goods and of labor and land services; 8. A modern treatment of the Ricardian economy: capital and interest aspects of the pricing problem; 9. Mathematical vindication of Ricardo on machinery; 10. Thünen at two hundred; 11. Wages and interest: a modern dissection of Marxian economic models; 12. Marx as mathematical economist: steady-state and exponential growth equilibrium; 13. What classical and neoclassical monetary theory really was; 14. A modern postmortem on Böhm's capital theory: its vital normative flaw shared by pre-Sraffian mainstream capital theory; 15. Schumpeter as economic theorist; 16. D. A. Robertson (1890–1963); 17. Lord Keynes and the general theory; 18. The monopolistic competition revolution.

About the Author :
Steven G. Medema is Distinguished Professor of Economics and the director of the University Honors and Leadership Program at the University of Colorado, Denver. The author of more than 100 books and articles, his latest book, The Hesitant Hand: Taming Self-Interest in the History of Economic Ideas (2009), was awarded the 2010 ESHET Book Prize. His articles have appeared in journals such as the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, History of Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Economica. Dr Medema was elected president of the History of Economics Society for the 2009–10 term and served on its executive committee from 1999 to 2012. He also served on the scientific council of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET) and is currently a member of the ESHET executive committee. Dr Medema teaches courses in price theory and the history of economic thought and in 2008 was designated a University of Colorado President's Teaching Scholar. He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Legal Fiction: An Intellectual History of the Coase Theorem. Anthony M. C. Waterman is a Fellow of St John's College, Winnipeg, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Manitoba. He read economics at the University of Cambridge (BA, 1954), studied theology at St John's College, Winnipeg (BTh, 1962), and earned a PhD in economics at the Australian National University (1968). Waterman has held visiting appointments at the University of Oxford, the University of Sussex, the University of Cambridge, the Australian National University, and Boston College. He has published many articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries since 1965 on economics, theology, the relation between the two, the history of economic thought, and intellectual history. He is the author of nine previous books, including Revolution, Economics and Religion (Cambridge, 1991), for which he was awarded the Forkosch Prize for Intellectual History in 1992, and Political Economy and Christian Theology since the Enlightenment. Waterman was elected Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society in 2007. He is currently working on papal social doctrine as economic thought.

Review :
'This book's editors begin with the observation that 'perhaps 20 percent' of Paul Samuelson's scholarly publications 'are clearly identifiable as studies of the history of economic thought' (HET). As a tribute to this intellectual bequest, they have, with Samuelson's animated collaboration, republished 17 of his HET papers and provided an exhaustive bibliography.' William Coleman, Economic Record