On relevance to the history of economics. Economics deals with human behavior in a limited realm, and the scientific understanding of human nature through time is surely relevant to the history of economics. Hammond's review ends with: Theirs is a worthy effort to recover some of the understanding of human nature that was lost in the nineteenth and twentieth century romance with science. Hammond's notion that there was some primal understanding of human nature that was "lost" due to science or "romance with science" is what I find hard to swallow. To focus on the issue at hand, consider the effects of nature (i. e., heredity) and nurture (everything else) on human nature. Surely even early efforts such as Galton's "Hereditary Genius" ("genius" is dominated by nature over nurture) usually represent an advance in knowledge over what was known previously, and in fact, a modified form of Galton's view represents the scientific consensus today. That early economists such as Mill had an exaggerated view of the malleability of human nature doesn't affect their conclusions much since they were operating at a fairly coarse level of analysis. When you examine more detailed economic phenomena, especially on a world-wide comparative basis, the defects of "analytical egalitarianism" as a basis of analysis show up. Albert Himoe