History and Historians of Political Economy.

• Author: Dugger, William M.

Werner Stark (1909-85) moved from Germany to Prague in 1934 and from Prague to Cambridge, with the German invasion of 1939. There he was supported primarily by a grant from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (half the grant was personally funded for a time by John Maynard Keynes). After the Holocaust and the war, Stark went on to a distinguished university career, publishing widely on the sociology of knowledge and on the complexities of individualism and community. The true friendship of Keynes and the enlightenment of the Society allowed him to write this manuscript and several others. Most of the others were published as written, but this book manuscript is only now seeing the wide distribution it deserves. The manuscript was donated to Fordham University by Stark's widow, Kate Stark, in 1989 where Charles M. A. Clark lovingly edited it for publication. Clark did a fine job, for it is simultaneously an excellent piece of scholarship and a joy to read. The style is fresh and sometimes brilliantly concise, with wonderful quotations and words of wisdom to be found in plenty. It should be in every university and college library.

This book is a history of the history of economics, that is, a historiography of economics. Stark believed that a historian of economics should address three fundamental questions: (1) When did the science originate? (2) How did the science develop - by historical epochs or by distinct schools of thought? (3) What is the character of economic science? Stark found that historians of economics usually took one of two approaches to these questions - either the historical or the theoretical approach. In the historical approach, the origin of economics is traced far back into Greek and Roman thought and the science is seen to develop according to historical epochs. Furthermore, the character of the science is seen as being very broad and historical. In the theoretical approach, the origin of economics is seen as beginning much later, usually with Adam Smith and his immediate predecessors and the science is seen to develop according to the theoretical innovations made by distinct schools of thought. Furthermore, the character of the science is seen as being very narrow and similar to the natural or physical sciences.

Stark himself saw economics originating with the emergence in the sixteenth century of the national market economy in Europe. The earlier town economies clearly were governed by the laws of...