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The Macroeconomic thought of Nicholas Barbon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

James H. Ullmer
James H. Ullmer
Affiliation:
Western Carolina University, College of Business, Cullowhee, NC.
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Extract

Nicholas Barbon (1640–1698) is little appreciated by most historians of economic thought. He is sporadically mentioned in a few writings—probably the most well-known being the favorable reference to him made by John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes 1936, p. 359). The fullest treatment of Barbon's economic ideas is contained in The Origin of Scientific Economics: English Economic Thought 1660–1776 by William Louis Letwin (Letwin 1963, pp. 48–75). Letwin considers a major defect of Barbon's first purely scientific inquiry into economics, A Discourse of Trade (Barbon 1690), and by implication, his other economic writings, to be “the logical incoherence of its parts” (Letwin 1963, p. 57). This criticism is not surprising in light of the pre-paradigm period in which Barbon was writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 101 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2007

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References

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