Swayamsiddha Sarangi

We (University of Utah grad student community) had the privilege of inviting Dr. Alex Thomas (Associate Professor, Azim Premji University) for a talk on his work on how aggregate demand was always an important consideration in the work of Classical Political Economists. What struck me the most about this talk and from reading his paper “Classical Economists and the Question of Aggregate Demand(https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.lib.utah.edu/doi/abs/10.1080/09538259.2022.2156160) was about the scant attention paid to works of scholars such as Richard Cantillon, François Quesnay, James Steuart and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. While the classical political economy work of the Smith-Marx-Ricardo triumvirate is still covered in some courses in Alternative perspectives, the wider sphere of Classical thought (or what some might term “Pre-classical thought” ) is still alien to many of us. Teaching and research in this arena is also very male-centric such that the works of scholars such as Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau are often not even mentioned.

Below is the link to the talk by Dr Alex Thomas : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf2dmd3Dyf0

Here is a paper that discusses the work of Jane Marcet and Harriet Martineau :