This is an intellectual biography of G.L.S. Shackle, economic theorist, philosopher, and historian of economic theory. It explores how Shackle challenged the aims, methods and assumptions of mainstream economics. He stressed macroeconomic instability, and developed a radically subjectivist theory for behavioural economics and business planning.

This volume unites scholars from all over the world, and with very different theoretical perspectives. Their chapters probe into typical Shacklean themes of time and money, uncertainty and expectation, and into the roots of G.L.S. Shackle's philosophical and methodological stance.

G.L.S. Shackle made numerous, pioneering contributions to the study of uncertainty in economic life. This volume studies the production process, where resources must be committed to specific technological purposes long in advance of the ultimate sale of goods to the consumer. The problems of such a system rest on the durability of the instruments it uses, whose huge expense can only be recouped if they can be used for many years. Yet at the time of investment, those years of use are in the future and uncertain. The firm is the essential institutional means of confronting this uncertainty. Expectation, Enterprise and Profit is concerned with the nature and mode of life of the firm as a means of policy formation in the face of uncertainty. Chapters include: The Nature and Matrix of Production, Investment and Expectation, Interdependent Decision-Making and Profit and Equilibrium.

It is Shackle's view that human conduct is chosen with a view to its consequences. But these are in the future, which cannot be directly known. Expectation will confine itself to what is deemed possible, but this leaves it free to entertain widely diverse and rival hypotheses. How can such skeins of mutually conflicting ideas serve the formation of individual or institutional policy? This is the chief question this book examines.

A biography of the 20th-century economist, George Shackle, whose contributions to issues of time, expectations and uncertainty made his reputation. Shackle opposed equilibrium-centred orthodoxy, concentrating on a concept of time-uncertainty which emphasized the degree of potential surprise.

In this book Professor Shackle seeks a single, unified and coherent basis which would serve for all economic theories.

Even a decade after the end of the 1914-1918 war, economic theory assumed that the world was tranquil and orderly. By 1939 an economic slump without parallel, allied to the re-emergence of military ambition in Europe, had brought economic theorists face to face with reality. In this classic book, first published in 1967, Professor Shackle provides a study, in exact and professional language, of the precise nature, structure, presuppositions, language and inter-relations of the theories which were formulated in these fourteen years - unparalleled in the whole history of economics except perhaps by the years of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. These theories are not prototypes on the way to something better but are of essential and permanent importance.