A History of Contemporary Economic Theories

The increased specialisation visible in economics research has been intertwined with the gradual disappearance of the study of the history of economic thought from universities world­wide. However, perhaps ironically, the fragmentation or super-specialisation of economics research also contains within it the need to understand how these different research agendas might be understood in a coherent manner. Alessandro Roncaglia’s The Age of Fragmentation: A History of Contemporary Economic Thought (2019), the book under review, provides the readers with a clear analytical lens to understand the seemingly disparate and divergent streams of economics research which emerged after World War II. His previous book The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought (2009) remains an important text in the domain of history of economic thought (HET hereafter) in particular and economics in general; a concise version of it was published in 2016 as A Brief History of Economic Thought (for my assessment, see Thomas 2019).

Theories of Value and Distribution