Book: Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics by William Oliver Coleman

Interesting subject matter, dull prose

William Oliver Coleman
Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004
ISBN: 1-4039-4148-3
237 pages
UKP 19.99

Among the numerous objections to economics that William Oliver Coleman catalogs and anatomizes in Economics and its Enemies, the objection that writers on economics often write tedious prose is not included. It is, alas, a problem with the book. Which is too bad because the book's subject is an interesting one.

Economics is necessarily liberal (in the classical sense of promoting individual liberty) and scientific, Mr Coleman tells us, and there are a whole lot of people who don't like those things. And the catalog of specific complaints against economics that he records is a remarkable one: economics may upset the social order, economics does not sufficiently upset the social order, a market is too democratic and people will pay too little attention to the authority of experts, the market is not democratic enough, and so on.

All of that is very much worth knowing. Especially since many political issues are economic ones underneath and it's worth being familiar with some of the arguments about them that are wrong. But it's much harder to be informed if the reader's eyes glaze over on pretty much every page. I will pick a page at random and quote the first paragraph that begins on it. Here we are:

    Rather than in religion or science, the true future of
    Marxism within Western Europe lay in Hegelianising
    philosophy. In the second third of the twentieth
    century, Marx the materialistic (even positivistic)
    economist began to be replaced by a 'young' and
    philosophising Marx. This is reflected in the greatly
    shrunken attention of Marxists to anything that could
    be described as economics: in one estimate Leszek
    Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism devotes only
    10 per cent of its pages to economics. So whereas the
    Second International tended to view Marxism as an
    economic theory, Das Kapital is, in the judgement of
    one representative of the modern tendency, 'not
    economics' (Carver 1975, p. 8).
    (p. 234, emphasis in original)

If you can read that paragraph with interest, you will probably enjoy the book.

The difficulty of reading the book is compounded by its being badly typeset. The lines are too long for the size of type used.

Mr Coleman makes little mention of what criticisms may legitimately made of economics. To be fair, that's not his purpose in writing, but it would have made the book more interesting.

Posted: Sat - April 5, 2008 at 06:00 PM   Main   Category: