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Some general observations about the history of economics are in order before the reader faces the diversity of detail that makes up the universe of history. Unlike general history or economic history, the history of economics does not deal with events but with ideas. Thus what Gibbon said of general history -that it is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" -- does not directly apply to the history of ideas, which reflects general history only after the latter has passed through the filter of the human mind.

During the long sweep of the history of economics economic thought has at times been close to general history, including economic history, and at other times more remote from it. What is probably true for all time is that those who generated economic thought did so in order to cope with the central economic problem of scarcity as it appeared to them, embedded as it was in the historical conditions of their time and place. This leads to the question: Who were the recipients of the help offered by the economic thinkers? Some of the latter addressed themselves chiefly to their contemporaries, either their fellow citizens or a wider group, while others made a plea that was supposed to be valid regardless of the conditions of time and place.

The absolutists who believed in the timeless validity of their thought attached an absolute character either to their thought itself or to the historical conditions prevailing in their time. The former would hold that certain propositions were valid under any type of social or economic organization; this point of view was held by a number of prominent thinkers in the history of economics who developed their argument at a high level of sophistication. This compliment cannot be extended to those absolutists who have been unable to visualize that the historical circumstances under which they live are liable to change and who, on the basis of this narrow vision, promulgate propositions for which they claim timeless validity.

Regardless of the extreme types considered in the preceding paragraph, most economic thinkers of the past served their time in the best sense of this word -- that is, they shaped their thought to make it suit the special conditions of their time. Thus the mercantilists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accommodated their theories and policy proposals to the needs of the rising nation-states engaged in chronic warfare. Adam Smith, on the other hand, extolled the virtues of peace and free markets to facilitate economic growth and industrial development, the path to which, unbeknownst to him, the industrial revolution had opened. Ricardo and Marx were writing at a later stage, when under the influence of urbanization and industrialization the problem of distribution had become more urgent. Although they arrived at entirely different conclusions, both placed distribution at the center of their analysis. Mill was aware of the need to protect some members of society from the unmitigated effects of laissez-faire and in consequence moderated his support of this principle. In the Western world, to which Marx addressed himself, the revolution he envisaged never took place; instead, to avoid revolution, reformers and social legislators as well as hardheaded politicians like Bismarck and Disraeli produced the modern welfare or social-service state. As conditions of plenty facilitated the rise of contemporary consumer society, a subjective theory of value grounded in utility placed the consumer in the center of economic analysis. The same theory also provided effective in arguments against Marx's economics. Later on, Keynes developed a general theory of the determination of the national income because of his desire to devise policies to cope with the Great Depression of the 1930s. . .

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