Plato's main contribution was in the field of political economy (optimal oganization of society).

He was one of the first to speak about the benefits gained from the division of labor. However, unlike more recent economist thinkers, he thought the benefits came from people specializing in what they do best (absolute advantage), rather than from people specializing in what they do better than others (comparative advantage).

Aristotle - He analyzed the economic processes surrounding him and endeavored to delineate the place of economy within a society that included commercial buying and selling. provides his philosophical analysis of human ends and means. He explains that means or instruments of production are valuable because their end products are useful to people. The more useful or desirable a good is, the higher the value of the means of production is. Aristotle then goes on to derive a number of economic ideas from axiomatic concepts including the necessity of human action, the pursuit of ends by ordering and allocating scarce means, and the reality of human inequality and diversity.

Malthus was interested in everything aboutPOPULATION s. He accumulated figures on births, deaths, age of marriage and childbearing, and economic factors contributing to longevity. His main contribution was to highlight the relationship between food supply and population. Humans do not overpopulate to the point of starvation, he contended, only because people change their behavior in the face of economic incentives.

In Keynes's words, "For the engine which drives Enterprise is not Thrift, but Profit." was a British economist whose ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He built on and greatly refined earlier work on the causes of business cycles, and is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and the most influential economist of the 20th century.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is often thought as a founder of modern economics. His chief contribution was to build a coherent and logical theory of how the economy works by stating the law of the demand. His two main works are: The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.Ricardo became interested in economics in 1799 after, apparently by chance, reading the work of Adam Smith. He subsequently published pamphlets and articles analyzing various economic problems of the day, including the stability of the currency and the national debt. After some struggle ("I fear the undertaking exceeds my powers," he wrote), his classic work, The Principles of Political Economy, appeared in 1817. Two of Ricardo's most important contributions were the theory of rent and the concept of comparative advantage. The former, which drew on the writings of (among others) his close friend and critic Robert Malthus, defined rent as "that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord [by the tenant farmer] for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil." Rent, Ricardo argued, is what remains from gross farm revenue after all the farmer's production costs have been paid, including remuneration for the capital and labor he had expended on the land. It is an unearned surplus (now referred to as an economic rent) in that its payment is not necessary to ensure a supply of farmland. For Ricardo, rent arises from the advantages that one site has over another due to differing degrees of soil fertility: rent per acre is highest on the most fertile land, and declines to zero on the worst quality soil.

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) is often misrepresented and misunderstood by social scientists and the political establishment — it’s often seen that Marx headed some large scale socialist revolution, eventually leading to what appears to be the collapse of Communist Russia and the associated states; in reality, Marx was but a famous — and rather extreme — thinker of his time.This piece will be in no way a complete introduction to Karl Marx, but rather a brief primer of his most important contributions to economic theory; that of surplus value created by the labourer.Marx’s work aimed to demonstrate that capitalism, which he clearly loathed — but understood as a great driving force towards economic growth — suffered a set of internal contradictions in its very philosophy which would eventually cause a great collapse.

François Quesnay was the leading figure of the Physiocrats, generally considered to be the first school of economic thinking. The name “Physiocrat” derives from the Greek words phýsis, meaning “nature,” and kràtos,meaning “power.” The Physiocrats believed that an economy’s power derived from its agricultural sector. They wanted the government of Louis XV, who ruled France from 1715 to 1774, to deregulate and reduce taxes on French agriculture so that poor France could emulate wealthier Britain, which had a relatively laissez-faire policy. Indeed, it was Quesnay who coined the term “laissez-faire, laissez-passer.”

Quesnay himself did not publish until the age of sixty. His first work appeared only as encyclopedia articles in 1756 and 1757.

In his Tableau économique, he detailed his famous zigzag diagram, a circular flow diagram of the economy that showed who produced what and who spent what, in an attempt to understand and explain the causes of growth. Tableaudefined three classes: landowners, farmers, and others—called “sterile” classes—who consumed everything they produced and left no surplus for the next period.