This book heralds a salutary departure for the field of economic methodology, and deserves to be read even by those harboring suspicions that modern discipline of economics is a mildly disreputable pastime that illegitimately lusts after the honorific of “science.” Too much of what has passed for “economic philosophy” in the past has been either: (a) a garbled recapitulation by economists of some prior discussions within the philosophy of natural science, with unreflective attempts to thrust some aspect of economics onto the Procrustean bed; or (b) awkward exercises by philosophers to mimic decision theory, game theory, or other flavor de jour of orthodox microeconomics, to purportedly illuminate minor philosophical questions (a veritable specialty of the journal Economics and Philosophy); or (c), less frequently, an exercise in consigning discussions of the economy to the low-rent district of the “philosophy of the social sciences,” as a prelude to writing it off altogether. Hands is the first writer since the 1930s to be equally well-versed in both contemporary philosophy of science and economics, and to insist that methodologists can hold their heads up high by repudiating these dead ends by innovating their own topics, reclaiming the mantle of ‘worldly philosophers’ concerned with all the Big Issues that your thesis advisor darkly warned you against.

Hands accomplishes this feat by reminding the reader that an earlier honor roll of true blue philosophers (he cites Mill, Keynes, and Neurath) managed to ply their trade without undue embarrassment through close engagement in economic controversies as well as in philosophical disputes, but that a certain coolness set in circa 1940 with the academic professionalization of the two disciplines. (Don Howard has begun to make this case as well.) In the 1960s physics envy got the better of the economists, and they sat out the decades of Popper/Kuhn/Lakatos/Feyerabend fireworks largely as passive spectators, cultivating their own well-fertilized gardens. However, with the fragmentation of philosophy of science into such schools as variants of pragmatism, the naturalistic turn, and the engagement with the sociology of scientific knowledge (each the subject of an individual chapter in this book), Hands suggests that a space has been opened up within which economic methodologists can make their own signal contributions to contemporary debates, and proceeds to survey the ways in which this has already begun to happen.

The first, and most significant lesson of this volume is that prominent philosophers of science have never been very far removed from their respective contemporary economic concepts and disputes, no matter how much it may have appeared otherwise in the Cliff's Notes versions of their ideas, a point now being promulgated by numerous recent works (Cartwright et al. on Neurath, Fuller on Kuhn, Hacohen on Popper, Kadvany on Lakatos). The importance of this insight is that an adequate understanding of philosophy of science needs to be situated within its socio-economic context, and that economic methodologists are distinctly well-placed to participate in this endeavor. The second lesson is that, however much modern economists may protest that they are immune to almost all cultural currents sweeping the sciences and humanities, in actual fact they are being pummeled hither and yon by everything from postmodernism and feminism and cognitivism to the not-so-stealthy return of Social Darwinism, and that the only people adequately positioned to notice and evaluate such buffeting are those who have reasonable familiarity with the relevant philosophical currents and scientific wellsprings. (Of course, these people may no longer receive their training in economics departments, but that's a different problem.) A third lesson, perhaps not adequately stressed here, is that the natural sciences themselves from time to time have derived inspiration and succor from various economic traditions, and this also raises interesting questions for economic methodologists. The payoff in staking out a “third way” between the economists and the philosophers is that there will exist an identifiable community which can intelligibly discuss the question of “whither economics?” for and with the general public, extending beyond the superficial commentary now found in newspapers and magazines (and movies: witness A Beautiful Mind) without being mistaken for impossibly impertinent thought police trying to dictate sanctioned proper behavior to economists (a forlorn and silly ambition in any event) or alternatively, as valued fellow-travelers of the philosophy profession (a remote possibility).

Furthermore, sensitive to the need to counter the suspicion that this ‘third way’ might constitute little more than an irrelevant pastime, like poetry or pushpin, Hands ends with a very perceptive chapter on the nascent attempt on the part of many writers to conjure an “economics of science.” Readers of this journal will be aware of many esteemed philosophers of science who have sought to render philosophy more relevant to the changing modern landscape of scientific organization and research by recourse to conventional economic models of scientists’ behavior. Economists debating the reorganization of universities and intellectual property in our era of globalization have done likewise. Hands does a wonderful job of exposing the many ironies and contradictions inherent in these forays, and suggests that the arbitrary disciplinary boundaries separating these two groups will not likely lead to mutually advantageous trade and discourse in the near future. Instead, he calls for his newly reconstituted economic methodologist to mediate between these two groups, identifying the ways in which economic models miss the real forces behind the vast reorganization of scientific inquiry which now have been recently made manifest as the consequences of prior attempts to protect the corporate interests of a certain large software firm which will remain nameless, or a certain cartoon rodent, or the governmental drive to wean universities off their dependence upon military funding. The capacity to think through the multivalent consequences of legal and economic changes which range so very far afield from any simplistic notion of scientific research as an epiphenomenon of individual utility and desire, something already called for by writers as diverse as James Boyle, John Ziman, Larry Lessig and Corynne McSherry, would be the competence of the kind of economic philosopher whom Hands conjures. This is truly a book for our time.