Abstract
This volume is a collection of 16 chapters written by well-known experts in the field of economic thought. At the very outset, as a teacher in the subject of economics for both undergraduates and post graduates, I would say that this book fills a major vacuum in the teaching of the discipline. We are living in a time where economic departments have either already removed completely or are keen to remove from their curricula the history of economic thought. As the authors have rightly pointed out in the introduction of the book, the mainstream practitioners of the discipline consider economic thought as no more relevant since the discipline has attained the status of ‘science’. According to them, progress of a discipline is linear and its ‘history’ is no more relevant for its practice. The professionalisation of the discipline, which is akin to the job of a professional like an engineer, is just to keep the ‘engine’ of the economy working or move forward without disruptions. Hence, according to mainstream practitioners, it is irrelevant to look at history in its march towards the ‘truth’.
In the contemporary world, which is dominated by uncertain situations including financial crisis, natural calamities and the spread of pandemic like COVID-19, the discipline of economics, however, has more roles to play beyond a technocrat. The position of the discipline is not just to provide technical solutions but also to offer ideas and directions to reduce uncertainties and distress to human beings in the world. Here the history of economics can provide a great help in reinventing the discipline. The history of economics would tell us that no economic idea has emerged in ‘vacuum’. On the other hand, there is a historical context within each economic idea emerged, and every ‘dominant’ economic idea at a particular point of time is a permutation and combination of different economic thoughts that ‘dominated’ at different point of time. Even though we put in every effort to remodel the economics discipline like physical or natural sciences, but we forget the fact that they include history of ideas in their curriculum. For instance, it is impossible to graduate in physics without studying Newtonian physics, even though contemporary physics is dominated by quantum physics. Similarly in mathematics, it is not possible to graduate without learning Euclidian geometry, even though modern mathematics is dominated by non-Euclidian geometry. Similarly, it is essential to include the history of economic thought in the curriculum since the student needs to know that economics as a discipline is pluralistic in nature and there are multiple paradigms apart from the mainstream approach. The current curriculum of most of the economics department gives the impression that there is only one approach, that is, mainstream approach.
There are 16 chapters in this volume. For the sake of convenience, these chapters can be broadly classified into four categories in terms of the issues each one deals with: Pedagogy in economics, economic thought, evolution of particular ideas within an economic thought and historicity of their own research agendas. The above categorisation of chapters is not strictly mutually exclusive but sometimes overlapping.
Professor C.T. Kurien’s chapter ‘History, logic and narrative in pedagogy’ highlights the need to reinvent the curriculum keeping in mind the societal nature of the discipline. According to him, the course needs to be designed essentially by including the following three aspects: First, economics should be taught in relation to real-life situations. Second, history, that is, how the history of economic changes influenced economic thought including neoclassical economics and, third, introducing the methods of collecting and processing raw material for analysis and interpretation of data. The above three pose as a challenge while designing a course.
Among the collection of chapters on various aspects of economic thought, Alex M. Thomas in his chapter ‘Theories of activity levels and growth before Adam Smith’ discovers some aspects of Keynesian economics in the writing of early classical economists. His conclusions are largely based on the writings of Richard Cantillon, Francois Quesnay, Anne Robert, Jacques Turgot and James Steuart. Ajit Sinha, in his chapter ‘From ‘change’ to ‘difference’: Sraffa’s reinterpretation of classical economics’, revisits the theory of value propounded by Smith and Ricardo to argue that their theories of value were rooted in the idea of ‘original cause’ of value. He argues that Sraffa rejected the problematic of ‘original cause’. However, with the help of his analysis of a standard system and the standard commodity as the scale of measurement of value, Sraffa succeeded in proving the fundamental classical proposition that distribution of income is independent of prices but prices are dependent on it. Chirashree Das Gupta, in her chapter ‘Capitalism, classical political economy and Marx’s departures’, argues that Marx’s theorisation of capitalist economy marked departure, rather than continuity, from classical political economy. The classical political economy believed in a freely competitive capitalist economy. On the other hand, Marx argued that oppression and exploitation in a capitalist system would be impossible to end without ending the regime of capital and profits. Roberto Scazzieri, in his chapter ‘Between theory and history: the structural dynamics tradition’, provides a comprehensive and long survey of literature on structuralist dynamics. He emphasises the link between economic theory and economic history that the structuralist dynamic analysis provides.
In the collection of chapters on the evolution of ideas within an economic thought, Meghnad Desai, in his chapter ‘A history of Marxian economics 1960–2010: how we ‘did’ it’, makes an interesting reflection on the evolution of Marxian economics from 1960 to 2010, of which he has been one of the major contributor. He observes that Marxian economics received much attention from mainstream economists during the 1970s and 1980s. John King, in his chapter ‘On the origins of post-Keynesian macroeconomics’, argues that there have been fundamentally three approaches to post-Keynesian thought. These three approaches were well established since the mid-1970s, even though they were not part of mainstream economics. Since the development of new classical and new Keynesian economics, the above post-Keynesian voices were pushed to the margins of the profession. The chapter on Geoffrey Harcourt provides a broad understanding of his contribution to economics as well as post-Keynesian literature in particular. Unlike other post-Keynesian literature, his contribution is not obsessed with non-neutrality of money and the question of unemployment equilibrium. On the other hand, he brings in the question of technical change, theories of price determination and Sraffa inspired capital theoretic critique of orthodox economics. Maria Cristina, in her chapter ‘Is there a Cambridge approach to economics?’, brings out plurality of voices within the Cambridge economics. She starts with the question: Is there a ‘Cambridge School’ of economic thought? According to her, they cannot be characterised as a school but rather ‘a group’. In the chapter ‘General equilibrium: a status report’, Anjan Mukherji provides an overview of the evolution of general equilibrium theory and addresses the question of ‘stability’ involved in it. Philip Anthony O’Hara, in his chapter ‘History of institutional economics’, provides a long historical account of the evolution of institutional economics. His analysis cuts across Physiocrats, Classicals, Marx, Schumpeter, Keynes and Veblen. He also provides an overview of the context in which a ‘new institutional’ school of economics has emerged as well as the contradictions and the negotiations the new school has with the old institutional school.
Within the collection of chapters on the historicity of their research agendas, Romer Correa, in his chapter ‘Buffer stock operations in history and economic thought’, traces the history of buffer stock operations and provides insights on what contemporary central banks can learn from the past in policy making. K.L. Krishna, in his chapter ‘Historical perspective of econometrics’, provides an elaborate overview of the development trajectory of econometrics as a dominant method in the discipline of economics, the context of its emergence and the challenges ahead in tackling various issues dealing with economic theory. Tirthankar Roy, in his chapter ‘Writings of Indian economic history since independence’, narrates the evolution of economic history as a method as well as discipline especially in India. He also highlights the existential ‘crisis’ the discipline faces and the new challenges ahead in its way forward. In the chapter ‘On the evolution of heterodox economic thinking in India’, Sunanda Sen points out that many of the nationalist writings during the colonial times had influence on the economic policy during the post-independent period in India. The earlier plans emphasised the role of the state and the public sector in the development planning. However, over a period of time, many of these ideas got sidelined with the dominance of a development paradigm which gave prominence to international finance. Sheetal Bharat, in her chapter ‘Two sides of the colonial coin: British and Indian women’s engagements with colonialism and patriarchy’, looks at the literature produced by women who lived in colonial India to get gender dimension of the history.
This book is obviously not a textbook. However, it can be used as an additional reading material in teaching to gain in-depth knowledge in the field. When I accidentally ventured into teaching history of economic thought for the first time, I was faced with the dilemma of choosing an authoritative book to introduce the subject. I was lucky enough to be directed to Roncaglia’s book The Wealth of Ideas (Roncaglia A. 2005. The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press). Without doubt, this edited volume written by eminent scholars in their respective fields is an addition to such authoritative works on the history of economic thought. Not only in teaching but also in research, this book shows the potentialities of deploying historical methods in research in economics. Since most of the young researchers in economics in India are technically proficient but not sufficiently ‘skilled’ neither to read nor comprehend a subject like economic thought, this book can definitely provide directions to those.