----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- 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). Copyright (c) 2002 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator ([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2850; Fax: 513-529-3308). Published by EH.Net (August 2002). 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