Economies and Its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economies.

• Author: Egger, John B.
• Position: Book review

Economies and Its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economies "William Oliver Coleman New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 314 pp.

Self confidence is recommended to any economist who tackles Coleman's book. Its presentation of enemies is so powerful that a reader with a tenuous understanding of the philosophical nature of his own subject is likely to despair for its future, despite the author's upbeat conclusion.

His anti-economists express "hostility to ... that stream of thought [from] Smith [to] Keynes, Hicks and living persons. This continuity of thought could be called the 'Mainstream'" (p. 8). Some readers may find this too conservative, for among his "anti-economists" are "supply-side economists" and "several twentieth-century Austrians," but Coleman's clarity makes it easy for the reader to form his own judgments.

Following a 17-page introduction, Part II examines "Objections to Doctrine"--that is, economies is false, useless, or harmful because of its politics. The anti-economists of Part III ("Objections to Practice") reject economic method as "inadequate, conceited, biased, and bidden," while to those of Part IV ("objections to subject"), economics is an enemy of their personal causes. The 37 pages of notes, a 32-page bibliography, and a 7-page index suggest the scope of the author's research. This is a scholarly book and any careful reader will learn from it.

The political attacks begin with the Old Right's 18th century complaint that economics' fondness for freedom and markets destroys the social order, offering Ferdinando Galiani and Jacques Necker as examples. Necker was one from whom the self-taught Alexander Hamilton learned economics, and the inclusion of Galiani, for his 1770 volume Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bles, illustrates that Coleman did not reject everything the "antis" wrote. Galiani is the author of Della Moneta (1751), a book Arthur W. Marget, in volume two of his classic The Theory of Prices (1942: 22), considered practically "a modern textbook." Marget also viewed Galiani as a precursor of the Austrian School's theory of subjective value. Likewise, Lawrence H. White, in his Free Banking in Britain (1984), commended the flee-banking views of anti-economist George Poulett Serope. Clearly, one must read with a firm grip on Coleman's standard.

Chapter 3 moves to the "left" position that economies favored the rich and defended enslavement of workers. The theme of Chapter 4, that economics is inconsistent with...