History of economics

In the 1500s there were few universities. Those that existed taught religion, Latin, Greek, Philosophy, history and mathematics. No economics. Then came the enlightenment (about 1700) in which reasoning replaced God as the explanation of why things were the way they were. Pre-Enlightenment thinkers would answer the question, “Why am I poor?” with, “Because God wills it”. Enlightenment scholars looked for a different explanation. “Because of the nature of land ownership” is one answer the found.

The amount of information expanded so rapidly that it had to be divided or categorized for an individual to have hope of knowing a subject. Soon philosophy

Was subdivided into science and philosophy. In the 1700s, the sciences were split into natural sciences and social sciences. The late 1800s and early 1900s social science itself split into subdivisions: economics, political science, history, geography, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Many of the insights about how the economic system worked were codified in Adam Smith’s The wealth of Nations, written in 1776.

Throughout the 18^th and 19^th centuries economists such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx were more than economists; they were social philosophers who covered all aspects of social science. These writers were subsequently called Classical economists. Alfred Marshall continued in that classical tradition, and his book, Principles of Economics, published in the late 1800s, was written with the other social sciences in evidence. But Marshall focused on the questions that could be asked in a graphical supply-demand framework.In doing so he began what is called neo-classical economics.

Afterwards Marshal’s analysis was downplayed, and the work of more formal economists of the 1800s (such as Leon Warlas, Francis Edgeworth, and Antoine Cournot) was seen as the basis of the science of economics. Economic analysis that focuses only on formal interrelationships is called Walrasian economics….

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