There are only a couple of figures like this in economics that I can think of: RH Tawney and EF Schumacher, Schumacher being my preference. Unsurprisingly Schumacher is now generally ignored, though he has a couple of superb books, one is "Small is Beautiful". There's another, the name of which escapes me currently. Ricardo is problematic, though his works are or crucial importance to understand modern economics. His ideas on comparative advantage might be true in principle but have led to some very static and damaging ideas on how trade should be conducted; of course what happened after his death as a result of people building upon his work, or misrepresenting it, isn't his fault, but it's a sign of how detached economists, and (social) scientists in general are from any grand narratives - instead focussing on their own fields without any sense or knowledge of context or morality. Sidi Abdassamad - we once had a brief discussion on the old Maliki-fiqh forum about the gold standard; you emailed me an article about it by the former US Fed chairman, very interesting, thank-you. Economics as a modern discipline may well be atheistic in its origins, but it doesn't necessarily have to be - Ibn Khaldun and Imam Ghazali, amongst others, are of the early scholars that considered economic issues.