First edition. 8vo. [8], 295, [1] pp. Original red cloth, spine lettered in gilt, dust jacket (single manuscript correction in neat pencil to p. 141, correcting a misprint of the name Bohm-Bawerk, contents otherwise clean and unmarked; spine panel of jacket only slightly toned, else a fine copy). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973.
’Maurice Dobb was the foremost Marxist economist of the Western world all through the 1930s, ’40s and ‘50s. In 1951, he collaborated with Piero Sraffa in editing the Works and Correspondence of David Ricard and this experience led him gradually to the view that ‘true’ economics did not start with Marx but rather with Ricardo and that the entire history of economics can be divided into two main lines of approach: the Ricardo-Marx-Sraffa line of analysis of the determination of the ‘economic surplus’ and the Smith-Walras-Arrow-Debreu line of general equilibrium analysis of price determination. His last book, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith, is an attempt to document this point of view’ (Blaug, Great Economists since Keynes).
