Browse the index
Filter by category and discipline, then by continent, country and century of birth. Countries not yet represented can be drafted at the research desk.
Category
Disciplines in Economics, Business & Politics
Economists, political economists, entrepreneurs and statesmen whose theories, firms and constitutions organise money and power.
Era
9 figures
John Stuart Mill
1806 – 1873Principles of Political Economy and On Liberty joined markets to individual freedom.
Karl Marx
1818 – 1883Das Kapital made class, capital and crisis the permanent grammar of economic argument.
Friedrich Engels
1820 – 1895The Condition of the Working Class in England founded empirical labour economics.
Max Weber
1864 – 1920Linked bureaucracy, religion and capitalism; founded the sociology of organisations.
John Maynard Keynes
1883 – 1946Argued governments should spend in a slump — and every modern state now does.
Joseph Schumpeter
1883 – 1950Creative destruction — the standard account of how innovation reshapes industries.
Karl Polanyi
1886 – 1964The Great Transformation showed markets are made by states, not found in nature.
Gunnar Myrdal
1898 – 1987Cumulative causation and the economics of racial inequality in America.
Friedrich Hayek
1899 – 1992Prices as information; the intellectual engine of late-century market liberalism.