Acknowledgements
These volumes were directly inspired by Mark Schauzen of Rollins College, Florida, who urged me to write a history of economic thought from an Austrian perspective.
In addition to providing the spark, Schauzen persuaded the Institute for Political Economy to support my research during its first academic year.
Mark first envisioned the work as a standard Smith to the present moderately sized book, a sort of Contra-Heilbrunner.
After pondering the problem, however, I told him that I would have to begin with Aristotle, since Smith was a sharp decline from many of his predecessors.
Neither of us realized then the scope or length of the ensuing research.
It is impossible to list all the persons from whom I have learned in a lifetime of instruction
and discussion in the history of economics and all its cognate disciplines.
Here I shall have to slight most of them and single out a few.
The dedication acknowledges my immense debt to Ludwig von Mises for providing a mighty
edifice of economic theory as well as for his teaching, his friendship and for the inspiring
and to Joseph Dorfman for his pathbreaking work in the history of economic thought, his stress on the importance of the stuff of history as well as of the theories themselves, and his painstaking instruction in historical method.
I owe a great debt to Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. for creating and organizing the Ludwig
von Mises Institute, establishing it at Auburn University and building it, in merely a decade,
into a flourishing and productive center for advancing and instructing people in Austrian
economics.
Not the least service to me of the Mises Institute was attracting a network of scholars from
whom I could learn.
Here again I must single out Joseph T. Salerno of Pace University, who has done remarkably
creative work in the history of economic thought, and that extraordinary polymath and scholars
scholar David Gordon of the Mises Institute, whose substantial output in philosophy, economics
and intellectual history embodies only a small fraction of his erudition in these and many
other fields.
Also thanks to Gary North, head of the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler, Texas, for
leads into the extensive bibliography on Marx and on socialism generally, and for instructing
me in the mysteries of varieties of millennialism, A, pre and post.
None of these people, of course, should be implicated in any of the errors herein.
Most of my research was conducted with the aid of the superb resources of Columbia and
Stanford University Libraries, as well as the library at the University of Nevada, Las
Vegas, supplemented by my own book collection accumulated over the years.
Since I am one of the few scholars remaining who stubbornly cleave to low-tech typewriters
rather than adopt word processors, computers, I have been dependent on the services of a
and the number of typists, word processors, among whom I would particularly mention Janet
Banker and Donna Evans of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.