The anti-economists.(Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics)(Book Review)

Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics, by William Coleman; Palgrave, 2002, about $130.

SCHOLARSHIP IS a rare enough thing in our universities these days, and rarer still in the social sciences, like economics. Even rarer is the ability to reason closely, as the many critiques of "economic rationalism" show. Often those with proven ability in scholarship or the "hard" sciences allow their brains to turn to mush when they address both current economic reasoning and the long history of attacks on it which scholarship should show to have been misdirected.

Thus a scholar undoubtedly of the first rank, Terry Eagleton, whose expertise is mainly in Marxism and English literature, writes pure nonsense about Irish economists and critics of economics in the nineteenth century in his Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (1999). Ironically, in a footnote to his latest book, William Coleman, one of the few (perhaps the only) genuine scholars in the social sciences in Australian universities under fifty, quotes Eagleton himself as writing that literary critics "are not usually adept at what is normally called thinking". Out of their own mouths ...

Coleman's book succeeds his earlier book (with Alf Hagger), Exasperating Calculators: The Rage of Economic Rationalism and the Campaign against Australian Economists (2001), in which the ignorance and incomprehension of the critics of rational economic policy analysis in Australia are meticulously documented in, indeed, exasperating detail.

This latest book is almost a history of anti-economics over the last two hundred years, and demonstrates just how constant the attacks on attempts to think systematically and rationally about economic issues have been amongst both intellectuals and the scribbling underworld.

This is one of the aspects of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment and reason which, while it has had the merit of calling to account the naive enlightenment notion that humanity is perfectible and potentially rational in its behaviour and beliefs, has in its place promoted a series of strands which culminated in fascism and communism (despite the apparently more rational base of the latter). Like the worship of the thuggish authoritarian Che Guevara, or the brutish Thomas Carlyle, sentimental attachment to irrationalism is all too hardy a trait of humanity.

Coleman takes us through a fascinating (and very knowledgeable) tour of the byways of discourse about social and economic issues. The detail is both complex and remarkably uniform. Rare is it to find a critic of economics who ...