The journal History of Political Economy rarely strays into the religious realm. From time to time political economists have been analysed for their usually fairly hostile views on religious belief. Thus reviews of John Stuart Mill or Adam Smith might include mention of their attitude to Christianity. However the growth in political history of the influence not only of religious practice but also of theology, as shown in Jonathan Clarke's English society in 1985, has not spread into the history of economic thought until now. Clarke's book began a revisionist historiography of the eighteenth century which included the place of religion. Blair Worden has argued similarly for the English Civil War.

None of this affected the historiography of political economy. There have been studies of religious faith and political economy, but these have been by historians of ideas or by theologians. The most well-known ones have been by Paul Misner (Social Catholicism in Europe, London 1991) and John Atherton (Social Christianity, London 1994). The only major exception to this trend has been the writings of the political economist A. M. C. Waterman, who for many years has written on the relationship between nineteenth-century Anglicanism and political economy. It is therefore welcome that a conference was held at Duke University in 2007 on the history of the relationship between religious and economic thinking in Europe and North America from the early nineteenth century to 1950. The papers have now been published as a supplement to History of Political Economy xl.

The volume is divided into three parts. First, there are studies of secular and Roman Catholic thought and economics in continental Europe. Faccarello and Steiner give a good overview of the response to Bentham in the years after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France. There was a vigorous debate about the place of religion in social thought, attempting to hold together utilitarianism and a Broad Church religion. One of the good things about this volume is the high standard of editing, so there are helpful cross references to Henry Sidgwick's similar attempt at reconciliation in late nineteenth-century Cambridge, although Sidgwick never read Stael and Constant. A very different approach, as the conservatism of de Maistre was left behind, was a full blown attempt to write a Catholic economics. It is here that the absence of Misner's work (though he is cited in the index) is felt, and equally I miss Mary Hobgood's Catholic social teaching and economic theory (Philadelphia 1991), which is not cited. What is however helpful, in an article by two Portuguese economists (Almodovar and Teixieira), is to show how Adam Smith's views on free trade were met with hostility by many economists in mid nineteenth-century continental Europe. The article by Parisi on the early twentieth-century Italian economist Francesco Vito is outstanding, and shows how his thought fed into Vatican II. Here we have a holistic account of Catholic theology, political history and welfare economics. Once again we see how the development of economic ideas in one country (Beveridge and Tawney) is received into mid twentieth-century Italy, but is also transformed with the development of the Italian economy in the boom years of the 1950s.

The second section, on the United Kingdom, is less original, partly because Waterman reprises some of his own thinking. There is a good study of Henry Thornton, one of the Evangelicals associated with the Clapham Sect, who nevertheless espoused a rigorous defence of monetarist theory, apparently content not to let his faith affect his economic analysis. The accounts of Sidgwick, Tawney, Hobson and Clay are more descriptive, perhaps unaware of the extensive theological discussion of Tawney in recent years. However these are useful summaries of political thought, and the varying attitudes to religious faith.

Finally we move to the United States. Here there is a very different feel. There are four articles. Two look at antebellum America, with fascinating accounts of how tariff reform became intertwined with abolitionism and Evangelicalism, and how Adam Smith's defence of free trade was assimilated into a moral psychology by academics who were economist or moral philosophers, but who were also active in the Evangelical tradition. These are much closer to Clarke's revisionist views, and they are the two articles which show how the history of political economy might be changing. Finally there are two subtle accounts of economists. Richard Ely was a late nineteenth-century economist who also read Schleiermacher when studying in Germany as a young man. His economic methodology undermined laissez-faire in the same way as Seeberg undermined traditional accounts of dogma. Ely was unusual in being so self-aware, and theologically literate. The other article, on the famous early/mid-twentieth Chicago economist Frank Knight, who taught Francesco Vito without making him give up his profound commitment to Roman Catholicism), shows how Knight's infamous hostility to religion (he once compared the pope to Hitler) was in fact more nuanced. Underneath the polemic was a correspondence with Unitarian theologians. The example of Hume's friendship with some clergy comes to mind.

How is this wide-ranging collection to be summed up? First, it is undoubtedly to be welcomed. The work on antebellum America, or on Vito in Italy in the 1950s, is very illuminating. Secondly, closer co-operation between economists, church historians and theologians would give any future study a greater depth and subtlety. The conclusion is not entirely aware of this need. It speaks instead of the importance of helping economists develop a proper grasp of ethical theory in order to move beyond a ‘simple framework of utility maximization’. That is no doubt a useful aim, but the conclusion is slightly defensive in pleading for religious belief to be taken seriously in this quest for ethical rigour. Clarke's revisionism is now more than twenty years old. It might be hoped that historians of political economy would be slightly bolder in their approach. Nevertheless, it is churlish to carp. There is much in this volume to be very grateful for; I hope a second collection will soon follow.