Classics today: Smith, Ricardo, Marx

This chapter argues that modern readers can benefit from studying the classics today, because the classical approach to studying an economic system in motion under a cumulative process of division of labour offers a superior starting point for analysing salient properties of capitalist market economies. While modern mainstream economics has adopted, but variously narrowed some of the ideas contained especially in the works of Adam Smith and less so in the works of David Ricardo and Karl Marx, its historical development involved a growing distance and even opposition to the concerns, methods and analytical approaches of the classical economists. This implied a remarkable loss of the huge analytical potentialities offered by the classical economists.