History of economic thought

The History of Economic Thought is the history of political economic theory.

To quote Ludwig von Mises:

Economics is the youngest of all sciences. In the last two hundred years, it is true, many new sciences have emerged from the disciplines familiar to the ancient Greeks. However, what happened here was merely that parts of knowledge which had already found their place in the complex of the old system of learning now became autonomous. The field of study was more nicely subdivided and treated with new methods; hitherto unnoticed provinces were discovered in it, and people began to see things from aspects different from those of their precursors. The field itself was not expanded. But economics opened to human science a domain previously inaccessible and never thought of. The discovery of a regularity in the sequence and interdependence of market phenomena went beyond the limits of the traditional system of learning. It conveyed knowledge which could be regarded neither as logic, mathematics, psychology, physics, nor biology.

Systematic treatments of logic, psychology, and biology were given as early as the 4th century B.C. The sciences of mathematics and physics are even older. Since ancient times, writers have made fragmentary insights into praxeological and economic considerations. However, economics as a science did not emerge until Richard Cantillon's Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général (written in 1730, and published in 1755), which was the first unitary and systematic treatment of the market process.