Foundations of Economic Analysis.

SAMUELSON, Paul A.

Item Number: 19046

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947.

First edition of the Nobel Prize-winning economist’s magnum opus and one of the most influential economic texts of the twentieth century. Octavo, original  cloth. Signed by the author “Paul A. Samuelson MIT” on the title page. Light rubbing, near fine in the rare original dust jacket with light toning to the spine. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. The nicest example we have seen of this title.

"Fifty years after it was written, "Foundations of Economic Analysis" (together with Hicks’ Value and Capital) is still one of the most inspiring classics of general equilibrium economics" (Niehans, History of Economic Theory). Paul Samuelson is one of the developers of both neo-Keynesian and neoclassical economics, the latter of which still dominates mainstream economics. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for having written considerable parts of economic theory, and he is one of the ten Nobel Prize winning economists still signing the Economist's statement opposing the Bush tax cuts. One of Samuelson's many novel contributions was that he generalized and applied mathematical methods developed for the study of thermodynamics to the field of economics. His inspiration for doing so came, in part, from his mentor, polymath Edwin Bisdwell Wilson who was a former Yale student of the founder of chemical thermodynamics, Willard Gibbs. Samuelson, therefore, is a successful example of interdisciplinarity, and he combined these ideas in his magnum opus Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947).