Economic Thought and Political Theory.

• Author: Schap, David

In his latest book, Richard A. Posner [2, 61-65] provides an economic rationale for the well-documented phenomenon that people primarily associate with those in their same age cohort. Though true, like other results in economics this result is truly dismal. What a rich array of experience and knowledge we deny ourselves by such cloistering. And while it is simply not possible to converse with the ancients of old, we can nonetheless visit for a time with their ideas in the work under review here. In separate chapters we can learn at the feet of Plato, Sir James Steuart, John Stuart Mill, Schumpeter and Hayek. Only one contemporary is represented, and it is Buchanan, which further makes the point since it is he who elsewhere [1, 5-6] has so much celebrated his own "visit" with Knut Wicksell (i.e., his 1948 personal discovery in the Harper Library at The University of Chicago of Wicksell's 1896 dissertation on taxation, which so significantly solidified Buchanan's own thinking). Much can be learned by reading the ancients in the original or, as in the present work, by reading modern works discussing their ideas.

Chapter 1, "Communism, Sparta, and Plato," by Samuel Bostaph, has a two-fold, iconoclastic mission. First, it seeks to expose as myth the popular belief that ancient Sparta can be regarded as a communist or socialist society. Second, it seeks to dispel the widely held notion that Plato's ideal regime was socialism or communism. In each case the argument is similar: although there are indeed communal elements to be found in both ancient Sparta and in Plato's ideal, in neither case can these elements be regarded as crucial or unifying.

Chapter 2 concerns "Sir James Steuart on the Managed Market," as told by Anastassios Karayiannis. I must confess that the ideas of Sir James Steuart were unknown to me before reading this chapter. Having now read about his ideas, I conclude that the reputation is richly deserved. Here we have a contemporary of Adam Smith who, unlike Smith, sought to explain how a perfect statesman can correct the intrinsically flawed market. Steuart believed in managed supply and managed demand. (Other than these, perhaps he would have left the market alone!) I leave it to specialists in the history of economic thought to decide if Steuart gets a fair presentation, except to say only that there appears to be substantial scholarship in evidence in the chapter. Nonspecialists might ask why they should be interested in a...