One would think that in a world torn by economic problems,a world that constantly worries about economic affairs and talks of economic issues,the great economists would be as familiar as the great philosophers or statesmen.Instead they are oniy shadowy figures of the past,ancl the matters they so passionately debated are regarded with a kind of distant awe.Economics,it is said,is undeniably important,but it is cold and difficult,and best left to those who are at home in perplexing realms of thought.Nothing could be further from the truth.A man who thinks that economics is only a matter for professors forgets that this is the science that has sent men to the battlefield.A man who has looked into an economics textbook and concluded that economics is boring is like a man who has read a basic book on tactics and decided that the study of warfare must be dull No,the great economists pursued an inquiry as exciting-and as dangerous-as any the world has ever known.The ideas they dealt with,unlike the ideas of the great philosophers,did not make little difference to our daily working lives;the experiments they urged could not,like the scientists",be carried out in the isolation of a laboratory.The notions of the great economists were world-shaking,and their mistakes nothing short of calamitous."The ideas of economists and political philosophers,"wrote Lord Keynes,himself a great economist,"both when they are right and when they are wrong,are more powerful than is commonly unclerstood.Indeed the world is ruled by little else.Practical men,who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,are usually the slaves of some departed economist.Madmen in authority,who hear voices in the air,are extracting their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas."The great economists can be called worldly philosophers,for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all of man"s activities-his drive for wealth.It is not,perhaps,the most elegant kind of philosophy,but there is no more intriguing or more important one,Who would think to look for Order and Design in a poor family and a speculator breathlessly awaiting ruin,or seek Consistent Laws and Principles in a mob marching in a street and a greengrocer smiling at his customers?Yet it was the faith of the great economists that just such seemingly unrelated threads could be woven into a single fabric,that at a sufficient distance the chaotic world could be seen as an orderly progression,and the noise resolved into a harmony.