Maggs Bros.

Samuelson’s seminal first book, based on his doctoral dissertation at Harvard, one of the most influential economic texts of the twentieth century in which he established mathematics as the foundation of economics, rather than a mere addendum.

Samuelson’s ’brilliant doctoral dissertation’ was a ‘milestone in the conversion of modern economists to the view that all economic behaviour can be fruitfully studied as the solution to a maximisation problem explicitly or implicitly employing the mathematics of differential and integral calculus. In addition, his formulation of the correspondence principle marked the beginning of the modern interest in economic dynamics, the study of price formation out of equilibrium’ (Blaug). ‘Samuelson more than anyone else brought economics from its pre-1930s verbal and diagrammatic mode of analysis to the quantitative mathematical style and methods of reasoning that have dominated for many decades’ (New Palgrave).

From the library of the American Marxist economist and Stanford professor Paul A. Baran (1909-1964), with his ownership inscription dated ‘April 1948’ in black ink to the front free endpaper.