Economics as Ideology

Hoover writes three intertwined intellectual biographies — John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski and Friedrich Hayek — as one story, on the argument that the political vocabularies we still use were built by these contemporaries out of their own circumstances and temperaments as much as out of economic analysis. Managed capitalism, democratic socialism and market liberalism are treated as three answers formed in the same argument, and the book’s claim is that you cannot separate the economics from the identity of the person making it.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s investing section includes the ideological history of capitalism itself — Hayek, Schumpeter and this book within a few entries of each other — so that the frameworks an investor inherits are read as arguments with authors rather than as background conditions.

Where I saw it: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, entry 37 of section IV, cited as Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. This is the section the saved X posts photographed. Full transcription: Li Lu’s Recommended Book List.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Li Lu — the Himalaya Capital founder who assembled it.
• John Maynard Keynes — one of the three subjects.
• The Road to Serfdom — Hayek’s own statement of the case, entry 36 on the same list, one place ahead of this book.
• Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy — Schumpeter, two entries later on the list, arguing the same period from a fourth position.
• Liberalism — one of the three traditions traced.
• Socialism — Laski’s, the third and now least-read of them.