Pre-Classical Economic Thought : From the Greeks to the Scottish Enlightenment

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. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-6 The Greek Heritage in Economic Thought....Pages 7-30 The Old Art of Political Economy....Pages 31-42 Biblical and Early Judeo-Christian Thought: Genesis to Augustine....Pages 43-67 Some Socioeconomic Aspects of Judaic Thought....Pages 68-76 Islamic Economic Thought....Pages 77-102 Continuity and Change in Islamic Economic Thought....Pages 103-113 Scholastic Economics....Pages 115-135 Scholastic Economics....Pages 136-146 The Development of Mercantilist Economic Thought....Pages 147-173 The Language of Mercantilism....Pages 174-184 In Search of Economic Order: French Predecessors of Adam Smith....Pages 185-210 The International Foundations of Classical Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: An Alternative Perspective....Pages 211-220 The Scottish Enlightenment and Political Economy....Pages 221-255 The Scottish Enlightenment: Evaluation of Origins....Pages 256-263 Back Matter....Pages 265-271