Samuels (emeritus, economics, Michigan State U., US), Henderson (continuing education, U. of Birmingham, UK), K. Johnson (economics, Wesley College, US), and M. Johnson (economics, U. of Wisconsin at Oshkosh) present four essays examining areas of the history of economic thought, each of which touch on such fundamental topics such as cost, property, rent, the problem of order, the legal-economic nexus, or distribution. Specific topics include the etiology of the division of labor in the work of Adam Smith, the relative value of examining recent economic thought and the characteristics of its treatment in the history-of-economic-thought literature, the historiographic strategies of history-of-economic-thought textbooks, and how the work of Thorstein Veblen rebut the charge that institutional economists don't produce theory. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Under the impressive editorship of Warren Samuels et al, this book addresses the state of the history of economic thought today. An important contribution to the study of the history of economics, this eagerly-awaited book will develop an unsurprisingly large following.