Introduction -- The Tradition of Economic Thought in the Mediterranean World from the Ancient Classical Times Through the Hellenistic Times until the Byzantine Times and Arab-Islamic World -- Mercantilism -- The Cameralists: Fertile Sources for a New Science of Public Finance -- The Physiocrats, Lluis Argemí d'Abadal -- Adam Smith: Theory and Policy.-Life and work of David Ricardo (1772-1823) -- John Stuart Mill’s Road to Leviathan: Early Life and Influences -- John Stuart Mill’s Road to Leviathan: The Principles of Political Economy -- Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) -- Johann Heinrich von Thünen – a Founder of Modern Economy -- The legacy of Karl Marx -- Friedrich List striving for Economic Integration and Development -- The Entwicklung according to Gossen -- Gustav Schmoller as a Scientist of Political Economy -- The Empirical and Inductivist Economics of Professor Menger -- Antoine Augustin Cournot -- Léon Walras: What cutes know and what they should know -- Knut Wicksell and Contemporary Political Economy -- The Scientific Contributions of Heinrich von Stackelberg -- Joseph Alois Schumpeter: The Economist of Rhetoric -- Against rigid rules - Keynes’s Economic Theory -- Keynes’s “long struggle of escape,” -- John Maynard Keynes and the Theory of the Monetary Economy -- James Steuart and the Theory of the Monetary Economy -- Friedrich August Hayek (1899-1992).

This reader in the history of economic thought challenges the assumption that today’s prevailing economic theories are always the most appropriate ones. As Leland Yeager has pointed out, unlike the scientists of the natural sciences, economists provide their ideas largely to politicians and political appointees who have rather different incentives that might prevent them from choosing the best economic theory.  In this book, the life and work of each of the founders of economics is examined by the best available expert on that founding figure.  These contributors present rather novel and certainly not mainstream interpretations of the founders of modern economics.   The primary theme concerns the development of economic thought as this emerged in the various continental traditions including the Islamic tradition.  These continental traditions differed substantially, both substantively and methodologically, from the Anglo-Saxon orientation that has been dominant in the last century for example in the study of public finance or the very construct of the state itself.  This books maps the various channels of continental economics, particularly from the late-18th through the early-20th centuries, explaining and demonstrating the underlying unity amid the surface diversity.  In particular, the book emphasizes the writings of John Stuart Mill, his predecessor David Ricardo and his follower Jeremy Bentham; the theory of Marginalism by von Thünen, Cournot, and Gossen; the legacy of Karl Marx; the innovations in developmental economics by Friedrich List; the economic and monetary contributions and “struggle of escape” by John Maynard Keynes;  the formidable theory in public finance and economics by Joseph Schumpeter; a reinterpretation of Alfred Marshall; Léon Walras, Heinrich von Stackelberg, Knut Wicksell, Werner Sombart, and Friedrich August von Hayek are each dealt with in their own right.