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The Natural Origins of Economics

Margaret Schabas

$163.95

Hardback

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English
University of Chicago Press
15 January 2006
References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms. In the early modern period, however, there was no common perception of the economy, and discourses on money, trade, and commerce treated economic phenomena as properties of physical nature. Only in the early nineteenth century did economists begin to posit and identify the economy as a distinct object, divorcing it from natural processes and attaching it exclusively to human laws and agency.

In The Natural Origins of Economics, Margaret Schabas traces the emergence and transformation of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a natural to a social science. Focusing on the works of several prominent economists—David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill—Schabas examines their conceptual debt to natural science and thus locates the evolution of economic ideas within the history of science. An ambitious study, The Natural Origins of Economics will be of interest to economists, historians, and philosophers alike.

By:  
Imprint:   University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 24mm,  Width: 16mm,  Spine: 2mm
Weight:   510g
ISBN:   9780226735696
ISBN 10:   0226735699
Pages:   208
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Margaret Schabas is professor in and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.

Reviews for The Natural Origins of Economics

An important and satisfying study. It offers a synthesis of history of science and of economic thought, surveying a large body of material from a distinctive angle and showing how nature, once densely interwoven with economics, came to be understood as merely an exogenous factor. - Theodore Porter, University of California, Los Angeles


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