"The Essential Hirschman brings together some of the finest essays in the social sciences, written by one of the twentieth century's most influential and provocative thinkers. Albert O. Hirschman was a master essayist, one who possessed the rare ability to blend the precision of economics with the elegance of literary imagination. In an age in which our academic disciplines require ever-greater specialization and narrowness, it is rare to encounter an intellectual who can transform how we think about inequality by writing about traffic, or who can slip in a quote from Flaubert to reveal something surprising about taxes. The essays gathered here span an astonishing range of topics and perspectives, including industrialization in Latin America, imagining reform as more than repair, the relationship between imagination and leadership, routine thinking and the marketplace, and the ways our arguments affect democratic life. Throughout, we find humor, unforgettable metaphors, brilliant analysis, and elegance of style that give Hirschman such a singular voice.Featuring an introduction by Jeremy Adelman that places each of these essays in context as well as an insightful afterword by Emma Rothschild and Amartya Sen, The Essential Hirschman is the ideal introduction to Hirschman for a new generation of readers and a must-have collection for anyone seeking his most important writings in one book"--

"Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler shaped economics as we know it today - their Chicago School laid the groundwork for much of the neoclassical tradition in economic analysis. This book brings together a collection of letters from these two Noble laureates from the post-war years, containing new information about their personal and professional relationships, and also illuminating the development of ideas which are now fundamental to economic theory. The book, edited by Dan and Claire Hammond, contains an introductory chapter, chronologies for Friedman and Stigler, and transcripts of 71 letters written from 1945 to 1957 along with enclosures."--BOOK JACKET

The rich correspondence that preceded the publication of Monopoly Capital Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran's death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. During those years, Baran, a professor of economics at Stanford, and Sweezy, a former professor of economics at Harvard, then co-editing Monthly Review in New York City, were separated by three thousand miles. Their intellectual collaboration required that they write letters to one another frequently and, in the years closer to 1964, almost daily. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. The letters selected for this volume illuminate not only the development of the political economy that was to form the basis of Monopoly Capital, but also the historical context—the McCarthy Era, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis—in which these thinkers were forced to struggle. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy—and at the historical conditions from which that critique was formed.