No Wealth but Life

Roger E. Backhouse was a lecturer at University College London and at the University of Keele, before moving to the University of Birmingham in 1980, where he has been Professor of the History and Philosophy of Economics since 1996. In 2009 he took a part-time position at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. After writing two textbooks on macroeconomics, he moved into the history of economics and methodology, on which he has published many articles in the leading journals, including History of Political Economy, the Journal of the History of Economic Thought, and the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought. His books include A History of Modern Economic Analysis (1985), Economists and the Economy (1994), Truth and Progress in Economic Knowledge (1997), and The Penguin History of Economics (2002) (published in North America as The Ordinary Business of Life, 2002). Books he has edited include The Cambridge Companion to Keynes (with Bradley W. Bateman). He has been review editor of the Economic Journal, editor of the Journal of Economic Methodology, and associate editor of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought. Tamotsu Nishizawa was a lecturer and then an associate professor at Osaka City University before moving to Hitotsubashi University in 1990, where he has been a professor since 1993 and Director of the Institute of Economic Research since 2007. He was a visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, from 2000 to 2001. His research field has been the history of economic thought. Professor Nishizawa's main publications include Economic Heretics: Economic Policy Ideas of the 19th Century Birmingham School (1994, in Japanese) and Economic Thought of Alfred Marshall and the Historical School (2007, in Japanese). He has edited several books, including Marshall and Schumpeter on Evolution: Economic Sociology of Capitalist Development (with Y. Shionoya, 2009). He was also the editor of the Journal of the Society of the History of Economic Thought in Japan.

• 1. Introduction: towards a reinterpretation of the history of welfare economics Roger E. Backhouse and Tamotsu Nishizawa; Part I. Cambridge Welfare Economics and the Welfare State: 2. Marshall on welfare economics and the welfare state Peter Groenewegen; 3. Pigou's 'prima facie case': market failure in theory and practice Steven G. Medema; 4. Welfare, taxation and social justice: reflections on Cambridge economists from Marshall to Keynes Martin Daunton; Part II. Oxford Ethics and the Problem of Welfare: 5. The Oxford approach to the philosophical foundations of the welfare state Yuichi Shionoya; 6. J. A. Hobson as a welfare economist Roger E. Backhouse; 7. The ethico-historical approach abroad: the case of Fukuda Tamotsu Nishizawa; Part III. Welfare Economics in the Policy Arena: 8. 'The great educator of unlikely people': H. G. Wells and the origins of the welfare state Richard Toye; 9. Whose welfare state? Beveridge versus Keynes Maria Cristina Marcuzzo; 10. Beveridge on a welfare society: an integration of his trilogy Atsushi Komine; Part IV. Postscript: 11. Welfare economics, old and new Roger E. Backhouse and Tamotsu Nishizawa.

'This remarkable collection of essays makes all previous histories of welfare economics obsolete. With the publication of this volume, we are able to see for the first time that to understand the strengths and weaknesses of traditional welfare economics requires a knowledge of the full historical context out of which it arose. Backhouse and Nishizawa have edited a landmark study.' Brad Bateman, Denison University, Ohio