Books & Authors Quiz: Books on Economics and Politics

The Scottish thinker Adam Smith published this book in 1776, and it is treated as the starting point of economics as a separate subject, which is why he is called the father of economics; its most quoted idea is the invisible hand, by which the self-interest of individuals is said…

Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and as Vishnugupta, was the minister and guide of Chandragupta Maurya, and his Arthashastra is a manual of statecraft that deals with the duties of a king, the organisation of the treasury, taxation, trade, spying, law and war; it is the earliest Indian work usually…

Dadabhai Naoroji, honoured as the Grand Old Man of India and the first Indian to be elected to the British House of Commons, brought together his writings in this book and showed with figures that a large part of India's wealth was being carried away to Britain every year through…

Karl Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital in 1867 as his full critique of the capitalist mode of production, built around surplus value and the exploitation of labour; the later volumes were edited and brought out by Friedrich Engels after Marx died.

Written during the Great Depression and published in 1936, this book argued that an economy can settle at a level of high unemployment on its own, and that the remedy is to raise effective demand through government spending; it created macroeconomics as we know it and the whole school called…

The Florentine writer Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513 and it was published in 1532; it advises a ruler to judge an action by whether it preserves the state rather than by whether it is virtuous, and for this it is called the first work of modern political realism and…

Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract in 1762 with the opening claim that man is born free yet everywhere is in chains, and he held that legitimate authority rests only on the general will of the whole people, an idea that fed directly into the French Revolution and into the…

Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, also published in English as Indian Home Rule, in 1909 while sailing from London to South Africa, and he cast it as a dialogue between a reader and an editor; in it he rejects industrial civilisation and modern machinery, and argues that true self-rule means rule…

Azad, who presided over the Congress during the Quit India years and became independent India's first Education Minister, dictated this account of the last phase of the freedom struggle and of Partition; his birthday, the eleventh of November, is observed as National Education Day.

Ambedkar, trained as an economist before he became the chief architect of the Constitution, submitted this study at the London School of Economics and published it in 1923; it traces the history of Indian currency and argues for a stable measure of value, and its reasoning fed into the debate…

The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published this long three-volume study of South and South East Asia in 1968, examining why the region stayed poor and pointing to institutions, land relations, administration and what he called the soft state; the title deliberately echoes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Amartya Sen published this book in 1981 and showed, using the Bengal famine among other cases, that famines occur not merely because food is short in a country but because groups of people lose the ability to command food, which he called a failure of entitlement; the work was central…