The Worldly Philosophers

by Robert L. Heilbroner

About This Book

First published in 1953 and revised many times since, Heilbroner's history of economic thought reads more like a set of biographies than a textbook. Each chapter follows one thinker, or a group of them, through the world they were trying to explain: Adam Smith watching the first factories, Malthus and Ricardo arguing over population and rent, the utopian socialists, Marx, Veblen's leisure class, Keynes in the Depression and Schumpeter on capitalism's future. The through line is that economics began as an attempt to make sense of how society provides for itself, and its big ideas came from people looking hard at their own times.

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