If we make of economics a religion, then we will lack the ability to adapt to the emergent circumstances of the time.
That's Keynes's viewpoint, if not his words.
In fact, says Keynes, he took that outlook from Alfred Marshall who did much to make "political economy" into the scientific subject of economics. As with physics and other sciences, economics theories must remain provisional, thought Marshall, and economists ready to grapple with emergent conditions.
Keynes relates that in the 19th Century Marshall received reviewer praise for injecting morality into economics but by the 20th Century was panned for the same reason, on ground of being unscientific.
My position: If economics studies and plans are not used for the good of the people, why bother with them?
Adam Smith
Wealth of Nations
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm
David Ricardo
Anthology of best work
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/ricardo-the-works-of-david-ricardo-mcculloch-ed-1846-1888
Thomas Malthus
Principles of Political Economy
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/malthus-principles-of-political-economy#lf1462_label_063
Jeremy Bentham
Defence of Usury
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/bentham-defence-of-usury
John Stuart Mill
Principles of Political Economy (Ashley ed.)
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/mill-principles-of-political-economy-ashley-ed
W. Stanley Jevons
The Theory of Political Economy
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/jevons-the-theory-of-political-economy
Alfred Marshall
Principles of Economics (8th ed.)
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/marshall-principles-of-economics-8th-ed
Industry and trade : a study of industrial technique and business organization and of their influences on the conditions of various classes and nations
https://archive.org/details/cu31924012536276/page/n15/mode/2up
Henry Sidgwick
The Principles of Political Economy
https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/sidgwick/ppe/index.html
Richard Cobden
Speeches on Free Trade
https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/2005/Cobden_1373.pdf
John Bright
Selected Speeches Of John Bright On Public Questions
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.52960
J.M. Keynes
The Economic Consequences of the Peace
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/keynes-the-economic-consequences-of-the-peace>
A number of experts now disagree with Keynes and argue that Germany, which had not been fully defeated, did rather well economically after World War I, better in fact than its former foes France, Belgium and Britain.
A.C. Pigou
The Economics of Welfare
https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/pigou-the-economics-of-welfare
Ludwig von Mises
The Theory of Money and Credit
https://archive.org/details/TheTheoryOfMoneyAndCredit
Marx's contribution
Joseph Schumpeter's widow, Elizabeth Boody, has remarked, "With Marx he had one thing in common — a kind of vision of the economic process. In his own Theory of Economic Development, Schumpeter attempts to present a purely economic theory of economic change which does not merely rely on external factors propelling the eco- nomic system from one equilibrium to another."
In the preface to the Japanese edition of his Theory of Economic Development Schumpeter says,
It was not clear to me at the outset what to the reader will perhaps be obvious at once, namely, that this idea and this aim [Schumpeter's own] are exactly the same as the idea and the aim which underlie the economic teaching of Karl Marx. In fact what distinguishes him from the economists of his own time and those who preceded him, was precisely a vision of economic evolution as a distinct process generated by the eco- nomic system itself. In every other respect he only used and adapted the concepts and propositions of Ricardian economics, but the concept of economic evolution, which he put into an unessential Hegelian setting, is quite his own. It is probably due to this fact that one generation of economists after another turns back to him again, although they may find plenty to criticize in him.Again, in the manuscript of Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, the economist observes,
In his general schema of thought, development was not what it was with all the other economists of that period, an appendix to economic statics, but the central theme. And he concentrated his analytic powers on the task of showing how the economic process, changing itself on account of its own inherent logic, is incessantly changing the social framework — the whole of society in fact.In her foreword to her husband's book, Ten Great Economists, Elizabeth Schumpeter comments, "The vision they had in common, but it led to very different results: it led Marx to condemn capitalism and Schumpeter to be its ardent exponent."
