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  • The Hesitant Hand. Taming Self-Interest in the History of Economic Ideas
  • Jimena Hurtado
Steven G. Medema. The Hesitant Hand. Taming Self-Interest in the History of Economic Ideas. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. xi + 230 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-12296-0, $35.00 (cloth)

Steven G. Medema presents an ambitious work dealing with economists' behavioral assumption of self-interest and the implications it has on establishing the appropriate role of the government. The book tells the story of the changing relationship between self-interested behavior as the building block of market economies and government action from the mid-nineteenth century up to the twentieth century. Medema shows that economists do not identify self-interest with egoism and, generally, find some degree of government intervention necessary to guarantee the well functioning of a market economy.

The author illustrates how economists since the late eighteenth century have believed that individuals act motivated by their self-interest. This action might or might not lead to the best social results. Each group of economists found in the book have different stands that go from confidence in the almost spontaneous coordination of private and public interest in the eighteenth century to the need of regulation in order to coordinate these interests in the nineteenth century and, finally, to a renewed confidence in the twentieth century. As Medema tells us at the end, there is no full circle in the story because the confidence of the eighteenth century is not the same one as that found in the twentieth century. However, even those economists more confident in the role of markets leave some room for government intervention even if they believe government officials might not be the best ones suited to regulate markets. The book presents a welcome discussion in a time when government intervention is once again at the top of public debate.

The conclusion it reaches might not be surprising, but the journey through which the author takes us is interesting and well documented. In particular, Chapter 4, presenting the Italian body of analysis on public finance, La Scienza delle Finanze, shows in detail the developments of what could be considered as a group of forerunners of public choice theory that have not received considerable attention from historians [End Page 849] of economic thought. Also illustrating is the brief story of the Virginia school that the author presents in the second part of Chapter 6, combining an analysis of the works and ideas of its members with elements from the sociology of science that help give a more complete picture of its development and aims.

The ambitious goals of this book come at some cost: even if the treatment of the authors is serious and documented, it is also rapid and not particularly innovative. Most of the book lacks references to secondary literature even if scholars working on, say, the Cambridge tradition, are numerous and their work extensive. This is not the case for Chapter 7 on Law and Economics where the author cites numerous references in the footnotes, but we must not forget that this is a field the author knows particularly well. And, even if it is a book in the history of ideas, given its topic, the lack of historical context gives the impression of a series of authors discussing in isolation with little relation to their social, political, and economic context. The authors Medema analyzes were not discussing mere theoretical representations of society, but rather they were aware of the practical policy implications of their debates.

The primacy of a practical or applied side of the story is reinforced by the absence of any discussion on the exact meaning of self-interest or of the conception of human nature that the economists developed. Even if the first chapter of the book has no intention of being exhaustive and only attempts at giving a glance at what "Adam Smith and His Ancestors" had to say about a society made of self-interested individuals, the debate over human nature played a major role on how these economists defined these individuals. It is not enough to say that economists "have consistently assumed […] that people will do the...

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