Are Economists Basically Immoral?: And Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion.

• Author: Hill, Peter J.
• Position: Book review

"Are Economists Basically Immoral?" and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion

By Paul Heyne. Edited and with an introduction by Geoffrey Brennan and A. M. C. Waterman

Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 2008.

Pp. vii, 483. $30.00 cloth.

Liberty Fund has made a concerted effort in the past several years to compile and publish the collected works of important twentieth-century thinkers, especially in the field of political economy. The latest volume to come forth, representing about one-third of Paul Heyne's extant essays, may bc one of its most important publications. It is convenient to have the works of authors such as Gordon Tullock, James Buchanan, and Armen Alchian available in a set of volumes. These authors, however, are familiar to most economists through their long history of publication. In Heyne's case, however, even those of us who were acquainted with him for more than thirty years have seen few of his written works. Unlike other influential twentieth-century thinkers, Heyne wrote almost nothing for peer-reviewed journals and was satisfied to make his arguments in personal settings with small groups of people. Most of his essays were written for discussion at Liberty Fund colloquia, for remarks to be given at a conference, or for publication by invitation from the editor of a book or journal.

One can gain a sense of Heyne's unusual career from the fact that he spent the majority of his academic life in a nontenured faculty position, eschewing the necessary steps to achieve promotion and tenure. He did publish a reasonably popular economic text, The Economic Way of Thinking, but even it did not compete in popularity with major introductory economics textbooks. These facts do not mean that Heyne was intellectually moribund; indeed, he was one of the most articulate and thoughtful economists of the twentieth century. His death in 2000 was a loss to the many people who had met and learned from him.

Because most of his ideas were transmitted through personal interaction or papers written for small conferences, and because he cared little for fame or fortune, the editors of this volume had to search through his papers to find most of his contributions to the field. Without Geoffrey Brennan and Anthony Waterman's efforts, the ideas of this important thinker would not now be available to a broad audience.

Heyne's perspective is especially important because of his unique background in both ethics and economics. He was an...