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This is the fifth edition, newly revised for the 1980's, of the most celebrated and popular account of the history of economics ever written.

The New York Times - If ever a book answered a crying need, this one does. Here is all the economic lore most general readers conceivably could want to know, served up with a flourish by a man who writes with immense vigor and skill; who has a rare gift for simplifying complexities.

A fascinating account of the lives and the times of great economic thinkers and social philosophers. ( )

The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers
by Robert L. Heilbroner

The Theory of the Leisure Class is a book, first published in 1899, by the American economist Thorstein Veblen while he was a professor at the University of Chicago.

Veblen claimed he wrote the book as a perceptive personal essay criticizing contemporary culture, rather than as an economics textbook. Critics claim this was an excuse for his failure to cite sources. Nonetheless, Theory of the Leisure Class is considered one of the great works of economics as well as the first detailed critique of consumerism.

Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and the most influential proponent of the "Single Tax" on land, also known as the land value tax. He was the author of Progress and Poverty, written in 1879.
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Joseph Alois Schumpeter (February 8, 1883 – January 8, 1950) was an economist and political scientist born in Moravia (Present-day Czech Republic). He was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.
Schumpeter's relationships with the ideas of other economists were quite complex in his most important contributions to economic analysis - the theory of business cycles and development. Following neither Walras nor Keynes, Schumpeter starts in The Theory of Economic Development[1] with a treatise of circular flow which, excluding any innovations and innovative activities, leads to a stationary state. The stationary state is, according to Schumpeter, described by Walrasian equilibrium. The hero of his story, though, is, in fine Austrian fashion, the entrepreneur.

David Ricardo (18 April 1772 – 11 September 1823) was a political economist, often credited with systematizing economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus and Adam Smith. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator, and amassed a considerable fortune.
Ricardo became interested in economics after reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1799 on a vacation to the English resort of Bath. This was Ricardo's first contact with economics. He wrote his first economics article at age 37 and within another ten years he reached the height of his fame.

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes CB (pronounced /ˈkeɪnz/ "cains") (5 June 1883 – 21 April 1946) was a British economist whose ideas, called Keynesian economics, had a major impact on modern economic and political theory as well as on many governments' fiscal policies. He advocated interventionist government policy, by which the government would use fiscal and monetary measures to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions, depressions and booms. He is one of the fathers of modern theoretical macroeconomics.

Adam Smith (baptised June 16, 1723 – July 17, 1790 [OS: June 5, 1723 – July 17, 1790]) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith is also known for his explanation of how rational self-interest and competition, operating in a social framework which ultimately depends on adherence to moral obligations, can lead to economic well-being and prosperity. His work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known rationales for free trade. He is widely acknowledged as the "father of economics".

Claude Frédéric Bastiat(June 30, 1801 – December 24, 1850) was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He is buried at San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.
Bastiat can be said to be of the "Harmonic" school of libertarians, who consider utilitarian and natural law arguments as two complementary aspects of a same world. Bastiat did not take part in the anarchist-minarchist debate (arguably, he died too early for that); he seems to have considered the State as something inevitable as far as an immediate practical matter — something that ought to be taken into account as long as it existed[citation needed]. However, like all classical liberals, Bastiat maintained a deep distrust of all government, in any form, and worked all his life to demonstrate that government control of private individuals and regulation of private industry was inefficient, economically damaging, and morally wrong[citation needed]. Bastiat asserted that the only purpose of government is to defend the right of an individual to life, liberty, and property[citation needed]. From this definition, Bastiat concluded that the law cannot defend life, liberty and property if it promotes socialist policies inherently opposed to these very things. In this way, he says, the law is perverted and turned against the thing it is supposed to defend. ( )

This is a literary work, something quite close to a novel. It’s a history of capitalism as seen through the life and times of several sociologists, political philosophers, and economists, in a language that successfully strives to be entertaining. There are many well turned sentences, many funny anecdotes, and the dramatics are gripping.
A succinct distillation of the ideas of the best known economists it is not, and unbiased it is not either. The author has a social conscience and states so clearly: he finds it shameful that the US poor should be percentually larger than those in Western Europe, and thinks a lot could be learned in Washington by studying the Scandinavian countries.
In this edition the last page before the index warmly endorses the works of Norwegian economist Erik Reinert, who has a regular column in the journal “Klassekampen” ("The Class War") and whose ideas are well placed there. ( )