Reviews of Books 463

A History of Economic Theory and Method. By Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. and

Robert F. Hebert. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975. Pp. xiii,
508.

"If I knew the world were to come to an end tomorrow," Bismarck is reputed
to have said, "I would move to Mecklenburg; . . . Everything happens there
fifty years later." From the standpoint of historical method, the history of
economic thought is the Mecklenburg of historical inquiry. Historiographically
considered, the approach followed by intellectual historians dealing with the
development of economic ideas has not changed in the past century. There
exist but few exceptions to be found. The discursive approach—already estab-
lished as the approved art form by the mid-nineteenth century—still dominates
the literature in the field. While it is true that the mode of exposition has been
influenced in recent years by mathematics, and statistics is occasionally em-
ployed as a tool of inquiry, the historical approach of historians of economic
thought has gone largely unaltered. In the field's textbooks—a traditional in-
dicator of the state of the arts—the format and historical method used by
Charles Gide and Charles Rist (A History of Economic Doctrine, 1909) con-
tinues to be followed. The traditional approach is characterized by an atomistic
assemblage of individual authors who are reviewed one by one in a succession
that is dictated by the calendar or loose literary rubrics and carried along by
explication des textes. It is an approach which is incapable of coping with the
population explosion of professionally active economists in the twentieth cen-
tury, and which may itself be a major contributing factor to the continuing
decline of the history of economic thought in graduate training. While social
scientists in other fields have long employed theoretical and statistical ap-
proaches that permit condensation of data and encourage generality of theme,
and both economic historians and political historians place high value on the
interpretative approach to the past, the same winds of methodological change
have moved but few leaves on the tree of intellectual history.
The new textbook by Robert B. Ekelund, Jr., and Robert F. Hebert ap-
proaches the subject in the traditional manner. Judged in the context of the
still dominant methodological genre, the book has much to recommend it.
The book, intended for "advanced undergraduate students with limited prior
knowledge of economics and economic tools," covers the period from the mid-
eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century with the twentieth
century.represented by three chapters (78 pages) dealing successively with
Keynesian economics, monopolistic competition, and "contemporary theorists."
At the end of each chapter the authors provide a long list of references to books
and journal articles that should prove useful to student and instructor alike—
although, reasonably enough considering publication lags, references to the
works of other authors include few post-1970 and no post-1973' studies. The
authors' comment that their text "eschews the encyclopedic approach" indicates
a sensitivity to the pedagogic problems engendered by the traditional hagio-
graphic approach. Their design to restrict the number of dead economists
reviewed is laudable, but since the principle is not overly exercised in the
464 Reviews of Books
book, the instructor who insists on completeness of coverage will not be disap-
pointed. Flexibility for course adoption is an especially important trait for
texts in the history of economic thought. In this connection, Ekelund and Hebert
note that "no two history of thought courses are alike" (doubtless a correct
observation of a situation perhaps accounted for by the field's failure to be-
come professionalized), and I would guess that the format of their book will
appeal to instructors of divergent or eclectic approaches. Colorful, though con-
densed, detail on the lives or personalities of economists is ably blended with
the presentation of ideas to enliven without detracting. In sum, A History of
Economic Theory and Method is a sound text in the traditional format that
should be seriously considered by instructors reviewing the available texts for
the undergraduate course in the history of economic thought.
ROBERT V. EAGLY, Amherst, Mass.

The Intellectual Capital of Michal Kaleiki, A Study in Economic Theory and

Policy. By George R. Feiwel. Foreword by Lawrence R. Klein. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1975. Pp. xxii, 583. $22.50.

Most economists' fame is local, and interred upon retirement. Most of the
minority whose names survive are eminent as expositors or partisans of the ideas
of others. The creative minority among the surviving minority are known for
one or two seminal ideas, which often bear their names: Say's Law, the Cobb-
Douglas function, the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem, the Leontief model, the
Phillips curve, and so on. There remain the Great Names as a minority of a
minority of a minority, active on many fronts of our subject and fructifying
most of those they touch.
What of Michal Kalecki (1899-1970)? From scattered readings of his English-
language output and extremely casual acquaintance (Chicago, 1946), I had
consigned him to the second, possibly the third, rank: an obscure and barely-
intelligible Polish Marxist precursor of the General Theory, who also devised
such refinements as a monopoly theory of income distribution, a political analysis
of business fluctuations, and the "principle of increasing risk" in investment
theory. But this full-dress study by Professor George Feiwel (seconded by
Professor Lawrence Klein) have convinced me, and should convince many
others, that Kalecki ranks much higher. He emerges as an architectonic econ-
omist of the highest caliber, whose biography (developed only incompletely)
was essentially tragic both east and west of the Oder-Neisse line. (He spent
most of his adult life bounced about between Josef Pilsudski's anti-Semitic
fascism, Oxbridge's snobbish condescension, Joe McCarthy's populist witch-
hunting, and Ladislaw Gomulka's relapse into neo-Stalinism.)
Certain of Feiwel's specifics are:
(a) Kalecki was much more than just another partial predecessor of Keynes.
He had in fact gone well beyond the General Theory in several directions before
the General Theory was published: explicit dynamics, including a capital-stock
theory of the business cycle complete with lags; distributional considerations,