It was voted the top Academic Book that Shaped Modern Britain by Academic Book Week (UK) in 2017, and in 2011 was placed on Time Magazine's top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923. This book was originally published by Macmillan in 1936. It is the book in the time of globalization. (…) I do not have any doubts that 'Ethics in Economic Thought' can be understood in every corner of the world. The causes and consequences of global financial crisis are still discussed among economists and experts from different fields of science.
The timing of publishing the book is perfect. Jackson, Bowling Green State University, USA) The book does an extremely good job of considering the contributions of mainstream, traditional, clearly economic thinkers, as well as sociologists, activists and practitioners who are not normally considered as purely economic thinkers. (…) The book is extremely well-written, and while the ideas are incredibly complicated, it is also easy to understand. Rightly recognizing the conflict in the discipline of economics between supporters of increased mathematicization and abstraction, the authors posit and make a case for the ethical and policy-prescriptive dimension of economic thought. Social classes, already present in the analysis of the Classical School and then disregarded by neo-classics, are seen in a totally different, confrontational perspective, resulting from society’s capitalistic structure: a structure to be deterministically overcome by the proletarian revolution or by the fall of the capitalist’s rate of profit. The same Hegelian root can be found in Marx and his historical materialism. The centrality and development of the nation, and an insistence on social reform in a non-Marxian approach, are emphasized within a framework of path-dependence. In Germany, the central role of the State finds a Hegelian basis and political economy is characterized by an accentuated historicism, through the works of the protectionist List, and of the exponents of the Historical School of Economics, in a sort of economic “nation-building”. The attention of the neo–classical economist is focused on individual’s marginal utility, and the whole equilibrium of the economic system is explained in mathematical terms, as with Walras and Pareto, implicitly supporting a conservative view of society. Later in the nineteenth century, political economy is heavily influenced by positivism, and economic phenomena are studied similarly to natural sciences.
Adam Smith, philosophically motivated by Moderate Enlightenment, is seen as the founder of the Classical School of political economy, and the embodiment of a “cosmopolitan” economic liberalism, valid at any time and place. The discussion of economic activity takes different turns in Britain and Germany: in the former, intermingling those two roots, it is based on an individualistic point of view in the latter, on the State as the centre of social and economic life. According to Schumpeter, the roots of economics are to be found in social philosophy and in the concrete business experience of daily life, particularly in eighteenth-century’s Britain.
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