Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes

265 Pages·2006·2.59 MB·English

by  Mark Skousen

Big
The
Three
in
Economics
OTHER ACADEMIC BOOKS
BY MARK SKOUSEN
The Structure of Production
Economics on Trial
Dissent on Keynes
(editor)
The Investor’s Bible:
Mark Skousen’s Principles of Investment
Puzzles and Paradoxes in Economics
(co-authored with Kenna C. Taylor)
Economic Logic
The Power of Economic Thinking
Vienna and Chicago, Friends or Foes?
The Compleated Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
(editor and compiler)
Big
The
Three
in
Economics
Adam Smith
Karl Marx
and
John Maynard Keynes
Mark Skousen
M
.E.Sharpe
Armonk, New York
London, England
Copyright 2007 by Mark Skousen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc.,
80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skousen, Mark.
The big three in economics : Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes /
Mark Skousen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-10: 0-7656-1694-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7656-1694-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Economists—History. 2. Economics—Philosophy. 3. Economists—Biography.
4. Smith, Adam, 1723–1790. 5. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. 6. Keynes, John Maynard,
1883–1946. I. Title.
HB76.S58 2007
330.15092’2--dc22 2006020466
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z 39.48-1984.
~
BM (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to
The Big Three in my life,
My editor, my friend, and my wife,
Jo Ann Skousen

Contents
Introduction ix
Photos follow page 104
Chapter 1. Adam Smith Declares an Economic Revolution
in 1776 3
Chapter 2. From Smith to Marx: The Rise and Fall of
Classical Economics 46
Chapter 3. Karl Marx Leads a Revolt Against Capitalism 64
Chapter 4. From Marx to Keynes: Scientific Economics
Comes of Age 105
Chapter 5. John Maynard Keynes: Capitalism Faces Its
Greatest Challenge 133
Chapter 6. A Turning Point in Twentieth-Century Economics 163
Chapter 7. Conclusion: Has Adam Smith Triumphed Over
Marx and Keynes? 191
Bibliography 219
Index 231
About the Author 243
vii

Introduction
During the past three centuries, three economists stand out as archetypes,
symbols of three distinct approaches to economic philosophy. In the
eighteenth century, Adam Smith, a student of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment, expounded a “system of natural liberty” (what we might term a
liberal democratic order consisting of an unfettered market and limited
government), and elucidated how a nation flourishes and advances the
standard of living of its citizens. In the nineteenth century, the German
philosopher Karl Marx attracted and inspired workers and intellectuals
who felt disenfranchised by industrial capitalism and sought radical so-
lutions to inequality, alienation, and exploitation of the underprivileged.
Finally, in the twentieth century, the British economist John Maynard
Keynes sought to stabilize a crisis-prone market system through activist
fiscal and monetary government policies.
The Pendulum and the Totem Pole
The stories and ideas of these Big Three economists are told in context
of a larger history I have described in greater detail in The Making of
Modern Economics. In the introduction to that work, I describe two
possible approaches to writing about the lives and ideas of economists,
what I term the spectral versus the hierarchal approach.
The most popular method of analysis I describe as a pendulum, by
which historians place each economist somewhere along a political
spectrum, from extreme left to extreme right. Figure A illustrates the
pendulum approach used in many economics textbooks.
The Pendulum Approach to Competing
Economic Theories
Simple though it is, I see several problems with the spectral ap-
proach. First, it treats Karl Marx and Adam Smith as coequals, that is,
ix