This is a book about a handful of men with a curious claim to fame. By all the rules of
schoolboy history books, they were nonentities: they commanded no armies, sent no men to their deaths, ruled no empires, took little part in history-making decisions. A few of them achieved renown, but none was ever a national hero; a few were roundly abused, but none was ever quite a national villain. Yet what they did was more decisive for history than many acts of statesmen who basked in brighter glory, often more profoundly disturbing than the shuttling of armies back and forth across frontiers, more powerful for good and bad than the edicts of kings and legislatures. It was this: they shaped and swayed men’s minds. And because he who enlists a man’s mind wields a power even greater than the sword or the
scepter, these men shaped and swayed the world. Few of them ever lifted a finger in action; they worked, in the main, as scholars—quietly, inconspicuously, and without much regard for what the world had to say about them. But they left in their train shattered empires and exploded
continents; they buttressed and undermined political regimes; they set class against class and even nation against nation—not because they plotted mischief, but because of the extraordinary power of their ideas.
Who were these men? We know them as the Great Economists. But what is strange is how little
we know about them. One would think that in a world torn by economic problems, a world that
constantly worries about economic affairs and talks of economic issues, the great economists
would be as familiar as the great philosophers or statesmen. Instead they are only shadowy
figures of the past, and the matters they so passionately debated are regarded with a kind of
distant awe. Economics, it is said, is undeniably important, but it is cold and difficult, and best
left to those who are at home in abstruse realms of thought.
Nothing could be further from the truth. A man who thinks that economics is only a matter for
professors forgets that this is the science that has sent men to the barricades. A man who has
looked into an economics textbook and concluded that economics is boring is like a man who has read a primer on logistics and decided that the study of warfare must be dull.
No, the great economists pursued an inquiry as exciting—and as dangerous—as any the world
has ever known. The ideas they dealt with, unlike the ideas of the great philosophers, did not
make little difference to our daily working lives; the experiments they urged could not, like the
scientists’, be carried out in the isolation of a laboratory. The notions of the great economists
were world-shaking, and their mistakes nothing short of calamitous.
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers,” wrote Lord Keynes, himself a great
economist, “both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is
commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe
themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy
from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”