The scholars invited to contribute the primary essays for this collection were given three mandates. The first was to survey the contemporary research in their assigned fields and to provide a bibliography that would give any interested scholar an entree into the literature. The second was to develop their own interpretive perspective on the economic literature of their assigned period. The third, and perhaps the most difficult, was to be very brief and concise. In a project of this type it would be difficult to extrapolate themes or evolutionary sequences that run through the literature over the two thousand years spanned by this survey. To some degree, the invited commentators provide a fund of suggestions that will stimulate interested readers to pursue this line of synthesis for themselves. The editor of this collection did not even entertain the idea of trying to coordinate the presentations and commentaries of this intellectually erudite and diverse group of scholars into agreed upon lines of interpretation. There is enough material, however, to provide a reference base for the interested scholar who desires to follow particular ideas from period to period.

Assembling contributions from top thinkers in the field, thiscompanion offers a comprehensive and sophisticated exploration ofthe history of economic thought. The volume has a threefold focus:the history of economic thought, the history of economics as adiscipline, and the historiography of economic thought. Provides sophisticated introductions to a vast array oftopics. Focuses on a unique range of topics, including the history ofeconomic thought, the history of the discipline of economics, andthe historiography of economic thought.

Warren J. Samuels Each book in this series explores the present status of its field in terms of where it is, how it got there, the existing tensions within the field, and something of how the field might develop in the future. Each book presumes that work in each field is neither settled nor unequivocal. Each book attempts to comprehend its field as an evolving, developmental process or set or efforts. This particular book, covering neoclassical economics, is the third of three in the field of the History of Economic Thought. The others are Pre-Classical Economic Thought, edited by S. Todd Lowry, and Classical Political Economy, edited by William O. Thweatt. Each one conducts the same kind of analysis as the others in the series, with the understanding that here we are dealing with the history of interpretation, rather than a substantive body of analysis of a certain aspect of the economy: for example, labor or international trade. (That understanding must be com plex and subtle, inasmuch as revision of interpretation of earlier ideas is part of the process-both cause and consequence-of re-analyzing the economy. ) In this group we are interested in how recent and contemporary writers have interpreted the history of economic thought differently, both among themselves and from earlier writers. 1 NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMIC lHEORY 2 Several topics must be discussed to place such work in perspective, in part as it is here applied to the history of the interpretation of neoclassical economics.

In this concise yet comprehensive history, Heinz D. Kurz traces the long arc of economic thought from its emergence in ancient Greece to its systematic presentation among the classical thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to the influential work of scholars such as Paul Samuelson and Kenneth J. Arrow. With a keen eye for how economic insights are acquired, lost, and reborn, Kurz focuses on the dynamic individuals who give old ideas new life and the historical events that provoke different approaches and theories. Over the course of this journey, Kurz explains what Adam Smith meant by the "invisible hand"; how Karl Marx's "law of motion" works in capitalist economies; the roots of the Austrian economists' emphasis on the problems of information, incomplete knowledge, and uncertainty; John Maynard Keynes's principle of effective demand and economic stabilization; and the insights and challenges offered by growth theory, welfare economics, game theory, and more. He concludes with a deft summation of world economists' major concerns today and their critical relation to world events.

William O. Thweatt This book is the second in three surveys of the literature in the history of economic thought in the Kluwer Recent Economic Thought series. The first book, covering the pre-classical literature, has already been published; a third, on the neo-c1assical period, is planned for 1988. This middle book surveys the writings on classical political economy for the past 30 years, or roughly since the publication of Joseph Schumpeter's 1954 monumental History of Economic Analysis. Shortly after World War II, the American Economic Association spon sored a Survey of Contemporary Economics [1949]. That work covered 13 subdisciples of economics, and in 1952 a companion piece appeared in which surveys of 10 additional subdisciples were presented. As Bernard Haley, editor of the second volume, stated, even "though in the two volumes twenty-three fields have been treated ... there remain some aspects of the subject ... that have not been reviewed" [Haley, 1952, p. v].