Magnanimous Review of Foundations of Economics

Jeffrey Herbener's magnanimous and very charitable review of my book Foundations of Economics: A Christian View is now available online. It was published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Journal of Faith and the Academy and that issue was just recently made accessible for internet readers everywhere. Herbener's piece is actually a review essay in which he discusses not only characteristics of my book but places the book in its historical context. In so doing, he masterfully provides a concise, yet tremendously insightful history of economic thought in the first ten pages of the review.

Herbener concludes his essay with the following:

Foundations of Economics stands in the august tradition of economic thought. Economics began in the High Middle Ages as a science of causal-realist laws about society built within a Christian framework and used in analyses of the ethics of commercial and political activity. In the nineteenth century, many economists were carried away by the errors of the British Classical School, which proved to be a dead end, and wasted their efforts. In similar fashion, the twentieth century has seen the efforts of many economists who have followed the Neoclassical School come to nothing. Yet, throughout the long history of economic thought, there have always been champions of the causal-realist view. Their numbers are swelling as dissatisfaction with the neoclassical approach grows. Perhaps we are on the cusp of another revolution in economic thought in which the causal-realist tradition will have opportunity as it did nearly 140 years ago to assert itself as the mainstream. For those who seek to study God’s natural social order, Foundations of Economics is now the gold standard of introductory treatments of economics in the causal-realist tradition.

You can read the review essay in its entirety by clicking here.