Davis, John B.

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEconomics Faculty Research and Publications Economics, Department of12-1-1998Review of The Rise of Political Economy as a Science byDeborah RedmanJohn B. DavisMarquette University, john.davis@marquette.eduPublished version. Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4 (December 1998): 2166-2168.Permalink. © 1998 American Economics Association. Used with permission.Journal of Economic Literature Vol. XXXVI (December 1998), pp. 2166-2200 Book Reviews -Editor's Note: Guidelines for Selecting Books to Review Occasionally, we receive questions regarding the selection of books reviewed in the Jour-nal of Economic Literature. A statement of our gUidelines for book se lection might be useful, therefore . The general purpose of our book reviews is to help keep members of the American Eco-nomic Association informed of significant English-language publications in economics re-search . Annotations are published of all books received. However, we receive many more books than we are able to review so choices must be made in selecting books for review. We try to identify for review scholarly, well-researched books that embody serious and original research on a particular topic. We do not review textbooks. Other things equal, we avoid volumes of collected papers such as festschriften and conference volumes . Often such volumes pose difficult problems for the reviewer who may find himself having to describe and evaluate many different contributions. Among such volumes , we prefer those on a single, well-defined theme that a typical reviewer may develop in his review. A volume that collects together papers from a wide assortment of different topics is not preferred to one devoted exclusively to one topic. We avoid volumes that collect previously published papers unless there is some material value added from bringing the papers together. Also, we refrain from reviewing second or revised editions unless the revisions of the original edition are really substantial. Our policy is not to accept offers to review (and unsolicited reviews of) particular books. We have examined the consequences of an alternative policy and have determined that we lack the resources to deal appropriately with unsolicited reviews. Coauthorship of reviews is not forbidden but discouraged and we ask our invited reviewers to discuss with us first any changes in the authorship or assigned length of a review. J.P. [Reprinted from JEL , March 1992,30(1 ), p. vLl B Methodology and History of Economic Thought The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Meth-odology and the Classical Economists. By Deborah A. Redman. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 471. $55.00. ISBN 0-262-18179- 7. Journal of Economic Methodology. The focus of these journals, however, is primarily eco-nomic methodology in contemporary eco-nomics. Discussions of economic methodol-ogy in the history of economics in contrast continue to appear chiefly in history of eco-nomic thought journals , and this has given these discussions less unity and prominence, JEL 98-0829 Deborah Redman's recent book aims to bring E conomic methodology has become a par- focus and attention to one important stage in ticularIy active field in recent years, as re- the development of economic methodology in fleeted by the appearance of two new journals the history of economics, namely, the eco-devoted to it: Economics and Philosophy and nomic methodology of classical economicS, 2166 Book Reviews 2167 More specifi call~, rather than the whole of I ssical economICS, she concentrates on four ~ a economist- philosophers who were espe-e~ly influential in developing the philosophy cf science of classical economics: Adam ~mith , Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill. Thus her subject is the eco-omic methodology or philosophy of science :f these representatives of British classical economics. The expression "philosophy of science" may be the more apt one, since it is Redman's strategy to use the philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth through nineteenth cen-turies-Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, John Locke, David Hume, Dugald Stewart, John Her-schel, and William Whewell-to create the theoretical backdrop against which thinking about the method and scope of political econ-omy in Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill developed. Her argument is that at the end of the eighteenth century natural philosophy and social or moral philosophy were believed to share the same underlying principles, so that the philosophical-scientific heritage of Bacon, Newton, and the others was the obvi-ous starting point for early efforts at treating political economy scientifically. It was not until Mill's efforts to distinguish social science and political economy as forms of in-vestigation with distinct requirements and also the acceptance of Whewell's hierarchy of the sciences led by mathematics and the physical sciences that natural philosophy was to lose its commanding methodological influ-ence. In the half century between these endpoints , British classical political economy developed largely on the foundations of Hume's attempt to construct a science of human nature and a moral philosophy mod-eled on Newtonian natural philosophy. This transfer of natural science methods and con-cepts to politicateconomy caused their slow alteration and evolution as political econo-mists struggled with what Mill would call the inexact nature of political economy. The period of classical political economy in Britain ultimately ended as much with the recognition that classical philosophy of sci-ence ill-fit a social science approach as with a change in the field's substantive content. Across this broad landscape Redman picks out a number of more specific episodes of in-te rest in understanding the history of classical economic methodology. A chapte r is devoted to the development of thinking about induc-tion. A discussion of science in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain treats educa-tion in political economy, the early spread of journals, and the diffusion of knowledge. A discussion entitled "The Birth of Econo-metrics" looks at the emergence of statistical inference and early statistical societies , "po-litical arithmetick," and the founding of Section F of the British Association for the Advancement of Science . An intriguing Ap-pendix lists titles of articles on science and economics from The Gentleman's MagaZine for 1731-1759, a periodical for "the eight-eenth-century man of letters" that seems to have been the equivalent of Scientific Ameri-can and Nature , to help es tablish the interdis-ciplinary tone of the period. But the heart of The Rise of Political Econ-omy as a Science is the discussion of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill. With the chapter on Smith the payoff is high. Smith drew more heavily on Newton's experimental Opticks than on the mathematical and theoretical Principia, and this , together with a healthy Scottish eclecticism, permitted him to shape and adapt his "Newtonian method" to social phenomena in a fashion that made "wide social emphaSiS" rather than "precise mathe-matical theory" the key methodological char-acteristic of his thinking (p. 257) . The chapter on Mill as the "last of the N ewtonians" is also excellent for its exhibition of the modulation of the Newtonian-Baconian inheritance in Mill's efforts to establish the role of empirical generalization in the inverse deductive method so central to the nature of political economy as an inexact science . The chapter that combines discussion of Malthus and Ricardo is uneven on the under-standing of these two figures . Redman rightly rejects the strong deductive-inductive dichot-omy between the two, and nicely describes how their differing conceptions of the scope and object of political economy impacted their respective methods of argument. She argues, however, that Ricardo had a sort of "brokers' myopia" (p. 288 fO that led him to 2168 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol . XXXVI (December 1998) approach political economy in a highly analytical, presumably philosophically naive manner that entailed a narrowness absent in Smith and Malthus. But Ricardo's Principles was very much in the natural philosophy tra-dition with rent, labor's wage, labor value, and profit as a surplus all defined in terms of natural principles, and his analytical tenacity in the debates with Malthus is largely explain-able by his unshakable commitment to the embodied labor concept of value and vision of the economy as a system of natural liberty. While Ricardo's style of argument may have been very un-Scottish, he seems no less philo-sophically motivated by his time than were Smith and Malthus. Nonetheless Redman's book is an impor-tant contribution to understanding the devel-opment of economic methodology in British classical economics. It collects together a dis-persed literature from historians of econom-ics on classical economic methodology, and builds a conception of seventeenth and eight-eenth century science around it as a compel-ling interpretive framework. The book will no doubt become a standard resource for those ' interested in the history and methodology of classical economics. JOHN B. DAVIS Marquette University C Mathematical and Quantitative Methods Tournament Solutions and Majority Voting. By Jean-Frant;:ois Laslier. Studies in Economic Theory. Heidelberg and New York: Springer, 1997. Pp. xiii, 255. $84.00. ISBN 3-540-62897-5. JEL 98-8473 If we accept that societal decisions should be made by comparing pairs of alternatives, we encounter the obstacle imposed by Ar-row's seminal theorem, a theorem that asserts that only dictatorships satisfy certain basic axioms. One way to circumvent Arrow's bar-rier is to determine the source of conflict among his axioms. (For instance, as we now know, Arrow's binary independence assump-tion prevents a procedure from distinguishing between transitive and intransitive prefer-ences so it erodes the effectiveness of the crucial axiom requiring rational voters.) The historically more common approach is to d e-sign methods to deal with the intransitiv pairwise rankings that emerge with such ease from majority voting. Procedures that us: ran kings (not tallies) involve tournaments_ the topic of this book. Economists not familiar with this literature may dismiss tournaments as ways to list alter_ natives to select tennis champions or set to agendas for a meeting. This area involves much more than that; it includes all methods that select alternatives by using the raw infor_ mation of ranking comparisons. Thus, for in-stance, it includes studies of how athletic teams are ranked when they receive a point for each victory. (This is the Copeland method.) In this survey, Laslier demonstrates the richness of this topic by dividing his presenta_ tioninto main themes. The book starts by describing the traditional abstract criteria used for judging competing methods . It then introduces. and analyzes a surprisingly large number of approaches. Next, procedures are developed and compared with an interesting use of statistical methods such as Principal Components and Multidimensional scaling. There even is a nice discussion relating solu-tion concepts from tournaments and game theory. Because the book is written with the sparse, precise, abstract mathematical presen-tation favored by this field-an unfortunate style that has limited the influence of this im-portant topic by imposing unnecessarily high entry costs on the uninitiated-I expect the book to be read primarily by choice theorists. For others, however, it serves as a useful ref-erence. In part, this is because Laslier sum-marizes the major properties of each proce-dure by conveniently listing what it does and does not do. For instance, by iteratively ap-plying Copeland's method to identify a set of "winners," and then applying the method to this set to find a refined set of winners, can there be a change? (Yes .) If only obvious "los-ers" are dropped, can this change the Copeland winners? (Yes.) Laslier's summary theorem of Copeland's method lists these and other properties in a checklist. A measure of the success of a survey of this type is whether someone working in this or i~ a related area learns something. Using thIS 

Review of \u3cem\u3eThe Rise of Political Economy as a Science\u3c/em\u3e by Deborah Redman

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Review of \u3cem\u3eThe Rise of Political Economy as a Science\u3c/em\u3e by Deborah Redman

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