Economics, like other social sciences, is interested in the analysis and
understanding of how societies organize their systems of production,
distribution and consumption of resources. In his influential book, The
Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (1944) noted that any economic
order is necessarily determined within its social context, which gives it
its particular shape and structure in conformity with the prevailing set
of cultural values - hence the diversity of economic and social forms of
organization. This is a general observation that applies to modern as well
as to primitive societies. To understand how diverse economic and social
organizations are formed, how they function, how they evolve and how
they are reproduced, we must recognize that economic relations are only
one aspect of human life and whether they pertain to the production of
goods and services, redistribution and exchange, or consumption, they
reflect - and necessarily are the product of - the prevailing historical
conditions, which include the level of (social, technological) development
with its modes of thinking, beliefs, religion and culture in general.
This book strives to present a somewhat succinct account of these
modes of thinking about the functioning of economic systems that
prevailed and prevail today in what is commonly referred to as the ‘West’ -
that is, Western Europe and North America since the 1500s. That makes
this book A Brief History of Economic Thought because it is confined to
a specific civilization and a specific period and does not attempt to deal
with economic ideas, whether current or ancient, from other civilizations
such as the Chinese, Indian, or Arabo-Islamic. There are indeed some
valuable and very rich contributions from scholars from these civilizations
but these have been unfairly consigned to history and neglected due to the
Eurocentric view of the world, which has prevailed since colonial times.
Given these limitations, the guiding principle for our presentation is to
evoke the major contributions which have had a lasting impact on economic thinking, starting with the evolution of economic ideas preceding
the birth of classical economics. These major contributions have sometimes
been referred to as ‘revolutions’ in economic thought, such as the classical
revolution, the Marxist revolution or the Keynesian revolution. However,
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