First published in 1990, this is an analysis of the history of western economics from Petty to Supply-Side, through the prism of the controversies over productive labour and its product. It treats the early economists’ "productive-unproductive" dichotomies as shorthands for many other sets of distinctions relevant for boundaries, value and welfare. Central to the debates is the question of whether the economy is said to generate a ‘surplus’. Economists and politicians with views on these matters include the Physiocrats, Smith and Ricardo, Marx and his Soviet and western admirers, the marginalists, Keynes, Polanyi, Becker, and Reagan. The book maps the shifting emphases that economists and social thinkers have placed on markets and ‘mode’ of production generally. This reissue will be useful to students of economic thought, welfare theory and policy, growth economics and economic systems.

Helen Boss Heslop studied Russian history and literature at Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in economics. She taught comparative economics and history of thought at the University of Quebec, and wrote on the former Soviet economies for the U.N. the World Bank and the Vienna Institute of International Economic Studies. In 2003 she began seriously to study the piano, applying the ideas in the book to her own life, music performance being an archetypal ‘ephemeral’ service and luxury activity according Smith, though one with ‘homo faber’ aspects pleasing to Marx, and rich in ‘producer utility’. Helen Boss Heslop has maintained interests in ‘happiness theory’, neuroscience and behavioural economics as well as music. The fields overlap in her 2013 article ‘The study of a musical instrument as an alternative system of belief’. In 2013 she established HH Promotions London Ltd and the Concert Artists’ Promotion Trust, to help classical musicians perform live.