For many years, the study of the history of economic thought was a study of doctrine and an examination of the logic of the argument as presented by respective authors. Sometimes this was peppered with a study of the doctrinal controversies in which the respective authors were engaged. This sort of doctrinal history failed to capture the imagination of practitioners of economics, and a popular argument was that economics was a progressive science: ideas that were good in the past will be embodied in the present science, and if they aren't represented in current work then by definition they have been proven to be wrong. From this perspective, the only sensible way to study ideas was to rationally reconstruct older arguments to fit with contemporary practice. The contestation of ideas throughout history would result in survival of only viable ideas.

But what if it were the case that certain ideas caught on for reasons independent of their scientific worth? To the historian of ideas there is the important move to understand the context—scientific, cultural, and political—of the clash of economic ideas. Perhaps ideas that were once rejected by the economics profession should have instead won the day in the controversies of that time. Sometimes, the results of the controversy remain ambiguous.

In the two books under examination, contextualization is vitally important. As Sir John Hicks argued about the 1930s, there was a time when the battle of the future of economic theory and policy was between the two titans—Keynes and Hayek, and it was unclear at the time who would be the victor. Hicks begins the article in which he makes that claim with a puzzle—at the time of its writing (the 1960s) one of the titans —Hayek—was largely absent from the curriculum of economists, yet at one time, he was the leading alternative to what would come to dominate economic education and research. Hicks doesn't really explain why the world of ideas cut the way it did. These books in their respective ways—one journalistic, the other social-historical—attempt to do that.

Nicholas Wapshott is a master journalist and storyteller; Daniel Stedman Jones is a skilled intellectual historian of neoliberalism. It is important to stress that neither is an economic analyst, and that will play a significant role in their respective works. The reason I say that is because an untrained specialist is often unable to assess the outcome of an economic doctrinal dispute unless they invest the time and energy to “get” the economic issues that are being debated and can judge the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the respective arguments. These books paint economic theory with a broad brush and focus their detailed analysis on ideology and the politics of public policy. As a result, I would say that both books provide a lot of good material for real historians of economic ideas, but that neither alone makes much of contribution to our understanding of the rise of the scientific challenge to the post-World War II Keynesian consensus at a professional level.

Jones's book is a work of political movement history, but Wapshott's book is not a professional scholarly work. It is written in the style of popular literature in contemporary affairs and public policy. What happens in both books is a blurring of the line between the scientific contributions of Keynes and Hayek (and others), and the political uses of their respective ideas in the 1940s–2000s. The Wapshott book is chatty in style—like a conversation you might find at an intellectual cocktail party in Boston, New York, or Washington, DC (or London or Paris); the tone of the Stedman Jones book waffles between social history and a conspiratorial narrative about neoliberalism—the level of discourse you would expect at a meeting in the 1960s in the backroom of a campus bar near Berkley or Columbia. A reader seeking ideas, their logic, and the evidentiary burden placed on a scientific proposition would do better to stick with Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect or read Lawrence White's The Clash of Economic Ideas.

That said, both books provide valuable information useful in a real reassessment of Keynes, Hayek, and the rise of the free market intellectual counter-revolution to the Keynesian consensus. I strongly believe that historians of economic thought should first contextualize contributions, or situate an author in a historical-political-social-scientific context to understand an argument, and then they must reconstruct that argument for contemporary context to see if it has any continuing relevance. The historian does the first, the theorist who uses intellectual history as a tool in contemporary theory construction does the second. The field of the history of economic thought should have room to encourage both sets of activities.

When it comes to the discipline of economics, however, the historian and the theorist both must understand the economic way of thinking otherwise the ability to access the “truth” and usefulness of an idea will be lacking. The challenges come in straightforward ways—was the unemployment of the 1930s a function of insufficient aggregate demand or government interventions that distorted price signals and thwarted efforts at recovery? Did the move toward deregulation and more open economies in the 1980s and 1990s result increased well-being or not? How did the world fare during “the age of Milton Friedman” is an empirical matter, not a philosophical one. As Deirdre McCloskey likes to stress, you cannot answer empirical questions philosophically. And, I'd stress in response to reading these books that you really cannot rely on your conversation partners at the cocktail party or in the smoke- filled backroom to provide the information; it requires economic analysis of various empirical information. And it gets worse when the fine points in the conversation turn to technical issues within the economics discipline having to do with the methodology and method of economic analysis—e.g., the role of equilibrium theorizing, the conception of a capital using economy, the role of relative prices in guiding production and consumption, the neutrality or non-neutrality of money, the role of interest rates in intertemporal coordination, and all the way to the zero lower bound problem.

As a final note, let me say, both books are well-written, if not always in my assessment well-argued, and they contain as I have said very useful information. The documentary evidence related to the Mont Pelerin Society is important to consult, as is the work on the various foundations that helped support the work of the academic challengers to the Keynesian consensus. Once again, the role of Ludwig von Mises is strangely overstated and understated, the narrative of a conniving Hayek and Friedman is overplayed (how about they were both just seeking truth as they saw it), and the tight connection between thinkers and politicians is overdrawn. But in telling these stories, there is so much raw material reported in terms of letters, internal documents, interviews, and reports on conferences and seminars that the books are as fascinating to read as history and gossip as they are frustrating to read as works of economic analysis of ideas and policies.