THE CLASSICAL SCHOOL

THE TURBULENT BIRTH OF ECONOMICS IN TWENTY EXTRAORDINARY LIVES

CALLUM WILLIAMS

Profile/economist Books, 277pp, £20

Callum Williams has written a brief tour of 20 important names in the economists’ hall of fame. As the senior economics’ writer of the Economist,

Williams could hardly be more qualified as a guide to these figures of the ‘classical school’, the founding fathers of modern economics. They were all born before 1900 and most of them, as Phillip Aldrick in the Times remarked, ‘are believers in laissez faire’. Aldrick went on: according to Williams, although his 20 thinkers often disagreed with each other, they ‘were a coherent body in a methodological sense... Unlike their modern successors, they rarely used complex mathematics to express their theories or empirical data in a rigorous way; they were philosophers, not scientists, but they were asking common questions, about how markets work or what value is.’

Aldrick enjoyed how Williams pointed out his subjects’ ‘bad mistakes’ as well as their brilliance: ‘He is a scholar, but the journalist in him can’t help pricking bloated egos.’ The Economist’s reviewer summed up this ‘colourful glimpse’ of the influence and character of these early titans of the discipline. ‘The chapters are brief – fewer than ten pages each – beginning in the 17th century and concluding in the early 20th with the death of the father of neoclassical economics, Alfred Marshall. The contributions of these thinkers are tied together by the author to offer a picture of the beginning of economic thought.’