In a two-volume history of economic thought from Antiquity to the mid-19th century, on the eve of the marginalist revolution, Murray Rothbard describes the development of ideas about key economic concepts - scarcity of goods, exchange, trade, utility, value, costs, price, money, interest - and the economic laws binding them, as well as economic policies that gradually evolved from comprehensive government regulation and micro-regulation to relative laissez faire. The author does not limit himself, as is often the case, to a point-by-point presentation of the ideas of the Great Economists, but, restoring the living fabric of history, introduces readers to “minor” figures, whose contribution to the development of economic science is sometimes more significant than that of many celebrities. Rothbard shows that economic theory is not a constantly progressive system of belief, but that it can and sometimes does move along a zigzag and even backward trajectory as later systematic errors displace earlier but correct paradigms, thereby sending economic thought down erroneous paths.