Economics in the Mainstream
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Economics in the Mainstream MAIN CURRENTS IN MODERN ECONOMICS By Ben B. Seligman Free Press. 887 pp. $11.75. Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Associate Professor of Economics, Barnard...
...It is one of the strengths of Ben B. Seligman's admirable volume that he boldly affiliates himself with American institutionalism...
...And it has been the continuing influence of the institutionalists which still shapes much economic criticism of the existing order...
...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN Associate Professor of Economics, Barnard College: contributor, "Harper's," the "Reporter" Broadly speaking, historians of economic ideas view the evolution of their subject either as the record of painful improvement in the techniques and tools of economic analysis or as the story of one of the social sciences...
...The sections on such contemporary economists as J. R. Hicks, Frank Knight and Milton Friedman are less satisfactory...
...Inevitably, it is best on the men with whom the author sympathizes...
...Among living economists, Chicago's George Stigler takes a similarly sharply focused view of what is worth investigating in the ideas of the past...
...It is not easy to understand most contemporary theorists with the aid of such apparatus...
...Not only is the author less sympathetic to his subjects, but he is handicapped by his, or the publisher's, decision to omit diagrams and formulae...
...The pages on Marx include not only a summary of Marxist economics but also a lucid discussion of revisionism and a fine examination of current Marxist controversy...
...It is exceedingly likely that an economist completely divorced from other studies of man will be incapable of dealing with economic power and baffled by the evolution of economic society...
...The publishers are correct in their jacket claim that no other volume covers the same ground...
...Although Seligman is obviously not a Marxist in the current political sense of the word, he finds much to admire, like any sensible person, in the Marxist vision of history...
...It is probably true that the average professional economist gains more from this narrow view of the past than from the alternative mode of investigation...
...Deriving from Thorstein Veblen, American institutionalism has influenced economists as diverse as John Rogers Commons, Wesley Clair Mitchell and J. M. Clark...
...Nevertheless, even on the abstract moderns, Seligman is a conscientious historian...
...In short, the history of economic ideas becomes a tale about the growth of mathematical economics, econometrics and quantitative methods...
...Professional economists and graduate students of economics will find Seligman's book an invaluable reference work...
...It is therefore fortunate that Seligman's book is so good...
...The sections on Veblen, Commons and Clark are first-class...
...As Joseph Dorfman demonstrated in his Economic Mind in America, it was the institutionalists, in the persons of their Wisconsin followers, who heavily influenced the shape of the New Deal...
...the late Joseph Schumpeter, for example, organized his monumental History of Economic Analysis around the refinement of economic theories...
...In style, this volume is forthright and vigorous...
...Although I cannot recommend reading it in one sitting, it should fascinate non-economists who are curious about how a subject once accessible to the plain reader has been filled so full of mystery...
...Among contemporary economists, the first approach is much the more respectable...
...For one thing, no one but a professional economist can understand a history of economic ideas written to this formula...
...it may be impossible to do so without it...
...Within his chosen perspective, Seligman has told the story of modem economic thought since 1870...
...Much more important, too, the thrust of the notion of economics as primarily technique is toward the isolation of economics from sociology, social psychology, history and anthropology...
...Even game theory and linear programming come within his purview...
...Subject to the limitation I have noted, his summaries do hit the major points of doctrine of the most abstruse of the modern theorists...
...But much is lost by so narrow a definition...
...Since most economists judge that their subject is best defined as a mode of investigation, they can learn from the study of "the wrong ideas of dead men" how that mode of investigation reached its current situation...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 2
