In March 1776 when Etienne Bonnot, abbe de Condillac, published Commerce and Government, he was sixty-one years old, the same age as Francois Quesnay when he first published on economics. According to Jacqueline Hecht he had been a habitué of Quesnay's entresol (1958, p. 252), and Nicholas Baudeau has referred to Condillac's close friendship with Quesnay (1776/1903, p. 443). A book aimed to present a complete account of political economy from one of France's most distinguished philosophers, a member of the Academie franchise (“the immortals”) and the Royal Academy of Berlin, was bound to arouse great interest.

With the coming of marginal utility theory, the economists of the late nineteenth century were left with a theory of exchange values, but not with a theory of value. For example, William Stanley Jevons suggested that the concept of value be dropped from economics, leaving behind only vectors of exchange ratios (Jevons 1879). Not a few general equilibrium economists today hold much the same view. However, then, as today, there were seemingly fundamental economic questions that required a more general concept of value. Whenever economists turned to describing the movements in the economy over time or comparing the economies of different countries, they inevitably wanted to make statements about changes or differences in the real value of goods.

Just over a century ago two noteworthy books in economics were published by women, contrary to the widespread modern impression that women's participation in economics is a recent phenomenon. Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Women and Economics (1898a, cf. Gilman 1898b), a landmark work of feminist and institutionalist economics (see M. A. Dimand 1995b). Rosa Luxemburg published The Industrial Development of Poland (1898) based on her 1897 Zurich doctoral dissertation. This distinguished contribution showed promise of the great abilities displayed in her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), a study that deserves recognition for its importance in macrodynamics and the theory of economic growth as well as in Marxian economics (see Joan Robinson's introduction to the 1951 translation). These two authors stand as giants in the history of economics–or would do so, if historians of economics were paying attention–but they were very far from being the only women contributing to economics in the 1890s.

The continual interaction between economic change and economic policies designed to manage or guide this change seldom finds such dramatic expression as when one type of economy replaces another, e. g., when the industrial economy replaces the agrarian or is in turn supplanted by the “post-industrial” economy.

Thus, when the American economy was in the thick of its industrial revolution during the decades around the turn of this century, it was subjected to a series of government interventions the lowest common denominator of which has been summarized in the title of a book by Morton Keller, Regulating a New Economy (1996). In the United States as in all other countries, these interventions consisted of a glorious jumble of attempts to solve problems as they arose, of “bespoke jobs” in response to diverse economic interests, and of sundry ideologically-motivated efforts to move events in particular directions.