When you combine economics and the history of ideas, you get a story. It is not a naïve story, showing growing sophistication or “progress”, but one which reveals a perennial interest in markets and labour, capital and money, in a variety of political and cultural settings. It is also a story which, while it can be made to seem coherent (and this Companion certainly does that), demonstrates changing paradigms, reversions, orthodoxies and departures, in ways Kuhn speaks about science. The contributors to this book, which is the third in a series on contemporary economics (the two others are theoretical econometrics and economic forecasting), define their work as a story. You come away from it with wide knowledge of economic thought from earlier times (for example, Aristotle's Politics, Roman notions of monetary exchange, mercantilism and the Physiocrats), up through the “classical” economics of Adam Smith's political economy into general equilibrium theory and neoclassical economics, to Keynes, post‐Keynesianism, monetarism and radical economy (and anti‐capitalist) ideologies of the present day. So the “story” of economic thought is clear to see and, for a serious academic collection supporting economic history and the history of ideas, this work will be on the desiderata list, despite its price.
Yet the history of economic thought is not merely a story: it is both a history of ideas and the history of a discipline, as well as a domain where historiography and methodology have changed in important ways. This work is aimed at economics specialists, advanced graduate students and competent lay‐people. For all these groups this will be a useful reference work to dip into to get a survey, reflecting modern scholarship, of specific economic areas, set in their historiographic context and filtered critically for their contribution. The three editors (Samuels has published widely and co‐edits the Journal of Income Distribution, Biddle co‐edits Research in the History of Economic Thought, and Davis edits the Review of Social Economy) have assembled an international, mainly North American and European, team. These include Backhouse, Blaug, Harcourt, Hoover, Moggridge and Waterman, many of whom are internationally recognized for work in this and parallel fields. The main section consists of historical surveys, followed by the second section on historiography (rightly highlighting developing methodology in this field – sociology of knowledge, hermeneutic interpretation, mathematical and econometric methods, diffusion and orthodoxy).
It is probably going to be of most use and interest when it examines the history of economic thought since Adam Smith's theory of political economy in works like The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. His work is set in the context of contemporary European thought, such as that of Quesnay and Turgot, and textual interpretation is used to examine concepts – like self‐interest and utility and equilibrium ‐ which have become absorbed into the mainstream economic lexicon. Comparisons with Ricardo and Malthus move us on through nineteenth‐century economic thinking about wealth‐maximization and materialism, picking up both on Marxian economics and Pagovian welfare economics. Of particular value is the companion sets Jevons and Marshall, Walras and Pareto and Cassel, in the context of a complex unfolding debate, keeping an eye on key economic ideas like value and capital, marginal utility and production. General equilibrium economics and “perfect” competition inevitably play a key part, as the Companion traces analysis and reaction, advocacy and theory into the inter‐war years.
Inter‐war economic thought has often been overlooked, and has often been over‐simplified as the time of Keynesian growth stimulation. The complexity of this period comes through well in discussion of those Cambridge years, noting the roles of Kaldor and Kalecki, Robinson and Kahn, and feeding through to the post‐war neoclassical microeconomics, with its paradigm‐shaping use of mathematical models, associated with Samuelson and Arrow, and the deconstruction of general equilibrium theory. The US emphasis on institutionalism promoted microeconomic perspectives and provides some of the interesting differences and tensions between different “schools” up to the 1950s and beyond. The connection of economic theory with macroeconomic policy is one of the recurring strands in economic thought in the last two hundred years, and with monetarism took on particular importance in the 1960s and 1970s. It shaped current notions of the role of government (in, say, competition), of controlling the money supply and the demand function of consumerism, and modern pluralistic scepticism about managing the economy. Rightly we are left with questions as to whether neoclassical orthodoxy can explain the economic facts of the postmodern world.
This Companion provides a highly useable story‐arc of the history of economic thought, supporting it with an intelligent historiography, relevant readings (good for both readers and for reference librarians checking holdings), and a clear understanding of the mutual influences of great or well‐known figures and their ideas and arguments. There is a chapter on biography in economic thought but overall the book focuses on the ideas: we find an evolving argument about central economic ideas and their interpretation and application. A subject index helps connect up the historical surveys with the historiographic/methodological section. However, it is not a basic work – it assumes prior knowledge of economic ideas, probably obtained from the many works about individual economists and economic decision‐making. This makes it a work for the advanced and graduate student, for teachers of economics keen to (re)familiarize themselves with topics for teaching, the information specialist in the field, and the lay reader keen to lay out a programme of systematic reading. By this token, tying up the methodology with the surveys in a more explicit way would have been useful (even though this is done elsewhere), and it looks very much as if the analysis of post‐war heterodox economics ran out of space. Even so, the Companion does focus on history, and modern events still need time to mature.
