Mark Blaug, an economic historian, calls Jacob Viner "the greatest historian of economic thought that ever lived." One of Viner's greatest accomplishments was his book Studies in the Theory of International Trade. This work is not just a history of the theory of international trade, but also a guidebook that tells where the early economists who studied trade were wrong and where they were right. In it Viner decisively refuted fallacies of mercantilism (see Mercantilism). Viner also wrote a famous 145-page introduction to an edition of John Rae's Life of Adam Smith.

Viner was an international trade theorist in his own right. His book The Customs Union Issue introduced the distinction between the trade-creating and the trade-diverting effects of customs unions (see Free Trade Agreements and Customs Unions). His earliest book, Dumping, was a comprehensive analysis of the subject.

Viner was known for his view that the long run mattered. Some of his best articles are reprinted in a 1958 book, The Long View and the Short. Viner wrote: "No matter how refined and how elaborate the analysis, if it rests solely on the short view it will still be... a structure built on shifting sands." One of the articles published in this book, "Cost Curves and Supply Curves," laid out the short-run and long-run cost curves that still show up in microeconomics texts.

Viner, who grew up in Montreal, was an undergraduate student at McGill University, where he studied economics under famous Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, writing his dissertation under international trade economist Frank W. Taussig. He was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1916 to 1917 and from 1919 until 1946. He moved to Princeton in 1946, where he taught until retiring in 1960. For many of his years at Chicago, Viner, along with Frank Knight, edited the Journal of Political Economy. Viner is not considered part of the Chicago school as he was much less sympathetic to free markets than his Chicago school colleagues.

Ranking among the most distinguished economists and scholars of his generation, Jacob Viner is best remembered for his work in international economics and in the history of economic thought. Mark Blaug, in his Great Economists Since Keynes (Cambridge, 1985) remarked that Viner was "quite simply the greatest historian of economic thought that ever lived." Never before, however, have Viner's important contributions to the intellectual history of economics been collected into one convenient volume. This book performs this valuable service to scholarship by reprinting Viner's classic essays on such topics as Adam Smith and laissez-faire, the intellectual history of laissez-faire, and power versus plenty as an objective of foreign policy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Also included are Viner's penetrating and previously unpublished Wabash College lectures. "Jacob Viner was one of the truly great economists of this century as both teacher and scholar. This collection ... covers a wide range with special emphasis on the history of thought. Today's economists will find [the essays] just as thought-provoking and as illuminating as did his contemporaries. They have aged very well indeed."--Milton Friedman, Hoover Institution "Jacob Viner was a great and original economic theorist. What is rarer, Viner was a learned scholar. What is still rarer, Viner was a wise scientist. This new anthology of his writings on intellectual history is worth having in every economist's library--to sample at intervals over the years in the reasoned hope that Viner's wisdom will rub off on the reader and for the pleasure of his writing."--Paul A. Samuelson, MIT "I am frankly jealous of those who will be reading Viner's essays for the first time, marvelling at his learning, amused by his dry wit, instructed by his wisdom. But although I cannot share their joy of discovery, I shall be able to savor the subtleties that emerge from rereading these splendid essays."--George J. Stigler, University of Chicago "This volume will be a treat for the reader who appreciates scholarship, felicitous use of language, and the workings of a great mind. The Wabash lectures are gems, and the introduction by Douglas Irwin contributes significantly to our understanding of Viner's accomplishments."--William J. Baumol, Princeton University/New York University