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Published by EH.NET (August 2002) 
 
Roger E. Backhouse, _The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics 
from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century_. Princeton, NJ: 
Princeton University Press, 2002. x + 369 pp. $35.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 
0-691-09626-0. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Warren J. Samuels, Department of Economics, Michigan 
State University. <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
Roger Backhouse, who holds a chair in the History and Philosophy of 
Economics at the University of Birmingham, is a leading, indeed virtuoso, 
historian of economic thought. He has written three different histories of 
economic thought. His _A History of Modern Economic Analysis_ (New York: 
Basil Blackwell, 1985) focused on the history of economic theory, centering 
on the theories of value and price. Theory exists somewhat in its own 
ethereal world. Backhouse's _Economists and the Economy: The Evolution of 
Economic Ideas, 1600 to the Present Day_ (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 
presented the context in which economic theory developed along with the 
development of theory itself. The context consisted of economic history, 
political economy and the history of economic ideas. Theory, while not 
necessarily directly generated by context, was closely related. Backhouse's 
_The Ordinary Business of Life_ has a differently designed combination: the 
economic-history context, so long as it was important, then increasingly 
the development of economic theory as a separate discipline. The title 
conveys the message, using Alfred Marshall's definition of economics rather 
than Lionel Robbins's definition ostensibly limiting economics to the 
analytics of pure resource allocation. (I say "ostensibly" because it is 
the rare historian of economic thought who can remain so narrow.) The 
intended reader is not the doctoral candidate seeking deeper mastery of 
economic theory -- who has the textbooks of Mark Blaug or Ingrid Rima, for 
example, for such purpose -- but the advanced undergraduate and lay reader. 
The book also appears in the Penguin series. 
 
Such a trio comports with a variety of conceptions of the discipline and 
its history. It also gives effect to the Post Modernist view that different 
stories can be told about the same putative subject -- though, of course, 
the subject changes with the story (even this point Backhouse holds at 
arm's length; see p. 328). That Backhouse can author three such different 
accounts attests to his skill and versatility, his non-dogmatic view of the 
history of economic thought, and that while he is not wedded to Post 
Modernism he does go part way with it. Not many historians of economic 
thought have the combined knowledge of economic history, intellectual 
history and economic theory that Backhouse offers to the world. 
 
The historical coverage by chapter reflects the design strategy. The 
sequence is as follows, after a Prologue: The Ancient World, The Middle 
Ages, The Emergence of the Modern World View -- the Sixteenth Century; 
Science, Politics and Trade in Seventeenth-Century England; Absolutism and 
Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France; and The Scottish Enlightenment 
of the Eighteenth Century. Through chapter 6 on the Scottish Enlightenment 
(including Adam Smith), the emphasis is clearly on political, social, and 
broad intellectual developments. Thereafter, the focus is on the 
development of economic theory,  
almost as if the foregoing types of development were suspended, though the 
message may instead be that modern economics is an emanation of the 
modern(Western) economy and not the pure, a-institutional science its 
practitioners tend to claim: Classical Political Economy, 1790-1870; The 
Split between History and Theory in Europe, 1879-1914; The Rise of American 
Economics, 1870-1939; Money and the Business Cycle, 1898-1939; Econometrics 
and Mathematical Economics, 1930 to the Present; Welfare Economics and 
Socialism, 1870 to the Present; Economists and Policy, 1939 to the Present; 
and Expanding the Discipline, 1960 to the Present; concluding with an 
unnumbered epilogue, "Economists and Their History." 
 
Readers of this review may be particularly interested in Backhouse's 
treatment, in Chapter 3, of the emergence of the modern worldview; and the 
split between history and theory (Chapter 8). They may fault Backhouse for 
neglecting economic thought in other cultures (if only to explore how 
culture-laden is Western economics, just as one might study how 
theory-laden are facts); for not being more critical; for neglecting 
American economic thought before 1870; and so on. 
 
Backhouse, to his credit, however, emphasizes the inevitable selectivity 
and thereby limited coverage of his or anyone's story of the history of 
economic thought. He also warns the reader of the danger of presentism, of 
treating "past writers as though they were modern academic economists" (p. 
3), while insisting that we inevitably view the past through the lens of 
the present and proposing that we identify and state our "preconceptions as 
explicitly as possible" (p. 7). He emphasizes that different generations 
ask different questions, "perhaps even questions we find it hard to 
understand," such that the question of "progress" in economics is 
problematic (p. 8). 
 
Notwithstanding these and perhaps other Post Modernist ideas, the domain 
treated in this and Backhouse's other books is rather conventional. Not 
surprisingly, the story turns from externalist to internalist: "As 
economics developed ... into an academic subject, the problems economists 
tackled were increasingly ones that arose within the discipline." Thus, 
"Given that my main aim is to explain how the discipline reached its 
present state, developments within its theoretical 'core' are clearly 
prominent" (p. 9). A critic might ask how economic thought reached its 
(parlous) present state. 
 
Backhouse thus increasingly narrows his domain as academic economists did 
likewise; academic practice thus eclipses the other elements of the story. 
Actually, therefore, Backhouse, like many other historians of economic 
thought, tells two stories: the story of economic thought broadly 
considered and the story of the technical ideas of a narrowly focused 
academic discipline. But he alerts the reader that those "developments 
within its theoretical core ... are not the whole story" (p. 9). If 
Backhouse had included something of the broader work of, say, Vilfredo 
Pareto and Friedrich von Hayek, or Kenneth Boulding and Herbert Simon, as 
he does with Smith, a different story might have been told. Perhaps that is 
the design for a fourth book! 
 
Part of the story Backhouse tells as follows: Histories that glowingly tell 
of the technical progress of economics "conceal as much as they reveal. 
Behind the fatade of increased mathematical rigour and precision lie 
fundamental changes in the meanings that have been attached to central 
conceptions and in the ways in which economists have understood what they 
were doing" (p. 327). If Backhouse can successfully convey to his reader an 
appreciation of some of the linguistic problems in economics (and 
elsewhere), he will have raised the level of historiographical 
understanding in practice. (See Warren J. Samuels, "Some Problems in the 
Use of Language in Economics," _Review of Political Economy_, Vol. 13, no. 
1 (2001), pp. 91-100.) His other field is methodology, and he is very good 
at it, too. 
 
 
Warren Samuels is the author of numerous books and articles in the history 
of economic thought and was named Distinguished Fellow of the History of 
Economics Society in 1997. Among his recent books is _Historians of 
Economics and Economic Thought: The Construction of Disciplinary Memory_, 
edited with Steven Medema (Routledge, 2001). 
 
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