At the university I attended, a few of the academics were strongly influenced by classical political economy, especially that of Smith and Ricardo. Prior to my student days, one of them had published a paper in the Cambridge Journal of Economics entitled “On the origins of the term ‘neoclassical'” (no free link available), which is quite well known among scholars interested in the history of economic thought. In the paper, he argued that the ‘classical’ in the term ‘neoclassical’ is a misnomer and that neoclassical and classical economics actually have little in common, despite attempts by neoclassicals to claim Smith, in particular, as their forefather.

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