Theories of Financial Disturbance: An Examination of Critical Theories of Finance from Adam Smith to the Present Day Book

In her intellectual history of theories about the impact of finance on macroeconomics, Toporowski (Oriental and African studies, U. of London, UK) reviews the thought of such figures as Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, Irving Fisher, John Maynard Keynes, Michael Kalecki, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Hyman Minsky. In the course of her exposition she finds that following the establishment of the classical consensus that finance merely intermediates and investment, there were essentially two waves in critical theories of finance—the first from the turn of the 20th century until the middle of the century and the second beginning in the 1970s—separated by an interregnum in which critical views of finance were concerned primarily with the interpretation of past history and coincided with the Keynesian boom after World War II. Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR