History of Economic Thought

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Perhaps the best introduction into the history of economic thought is still the classic first published in 1953: The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers by Robert Heilbroner.

Another useful book is A Companion to the History of Economic Thought by Jeff E. Biddle, Warren Samuels, and John Bryan Davis. As it is a collection of chapters written by different authors on specific schools of thought and periods in time, it can be read piece by piece according to your own interest.

An interdisciplinary history of economic thought, that also systematically includes the insights of other disciplines, unfortunately still needs to be written. We have ourselves, therefore, written an article on this topic in which we summarize the histories of the various economic subdisciplines: Broadening the History of Economic Thought - Stretching across disciplines.

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