Keith Darden's book pivots around a comparative political economy puzzle. Despite their structural similarities, the post-Soviet states have chosen three distinct institutional arrangements for governing their trade relations with other countries: rapid entry into Western multilateral institutions (Kyrgyzstan, Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, and Lithuania); the formation of a regional bloc (Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan); and the pursuit of national autarchy (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and, initially, Ukraine and Azerbaijan). Similar states. Different choices. Why? The first and most obvious way of reading this book is to simply see it as an attempt to answer this question. Why did the post-Soviet states, which were so similar when they become independent in 1991, choose such different forms for managing their international economic relations?

What differentiates the post-Soviet states, answers Darden, is not their economic circumstances or institutional structures but, rather, the economic ideas embraced by the political elites in each state since 1991. To explain the case, one needs to look beyond traditional theories (such as realism, liberalism, and standard constructivism) and to develop a new theoretical apparatus. In other words, one way of reading the book is as an empirical investigation in which a theory of economic ideas (the ideas about the way that economies function and the best means of ordering social and economic life) is used as an explanatory and interpretive vehicle to elucidate a range of particular cases. Read this way, the book is about how economic ideas shaped the mental models and preferences of governing elites of the post-Soviet states and, consequently, shaped the institutional arrangements of those countries.

There is another approach to the book, however, and that is to read it as an attempt to use the case of post-Soviet states as a vehicle for developing a very challenging theory of economic ideas: Can we really treat ideas as first movers, as an independent cause? The book makes a strong claim that we can. To make the claim, the author introduces “a novel theoretical position,” that the process by which political elites adopt an economic idea or another is “sufficiently contingent and resistant to systematic explanation.” That means that “officials' ideas, in most cases, can be treated as independent and exogenous” (p. 313). The measure of Darden's achievement is the fact that irrespective of how one reads the book—as an applied comparative politics study or as an effort at broad theory development—the conclusion is bound to be the same: It is a remarkable contribution to the literature.

The empirical dimension of the book is outstanding for at least two reasons. First, it as an example of a bold social science conjecture, followed by a careful multimethod effort to test it. Ethnographic fieldwork, personal interviews, large-n statistical techniques, detailed study of internal government documents, historical techniques, content analysis, and process tracing are skillfully employed to test the author's empirical claim that actors' ideas about economic causation determine whether they support one institutional arrangement or another. Moreover, the reader gets the refreshing feeling that the questions asked (and the research designed to deal with them) are in control of the methodology, and not the other way around. The book never falls into fashionable methodological posturing and barren displays of technical cleverness.

The second reason the book's empirics are outstanding is the ingenious way in which it demonstrates that the economic ideas are themselves driving institutional choice. The assumption: “the absence (or impossibility) of a systematic theory of the selection of ideas enhances our ability to test for their effects” (p. 17). The strategy: to make the case that “the factors leading to the adoption of economic ideas across post-Soviet countries were highly circumstantial and idiosyncratic” (p. 17) and, thus, not systematically related to the factors predicted by standard theories. The approach is clear: “By ruling out rival explanations, by demonstrating the contingent and unsystematic process by which certain economic ideas came to be employed by the government in each country, and by demonstrating a strong link between the economic ideas and the policy choices through both statistical methods and qualitative case methods, we gain confidence that economic ideas are genuinely driving institutional choice among the post-Soviet states” (p. 18).

Such an analysis would, in itself, be sufficient to give Darden's book the status of a landmark. After 20 years of postcommunist transition, the essential topic of the nature and role of the economic ideas employed by the region's elites still lacked a systematic treatment. The question has thus haunted the literature, rendering a large part of it incomplete or naive. Here is the remedy.

As mentioned, the book does much more than fill a gap in the “transition” literature, however. Its main merit comes from its contributions to a distinguished school of thought focused on the “political power of economic ideas,” to what Darden identifies as the “individualistic,” “Weberian” tradition associated with the work of Ernst Haas, Peter Haas, Peter Hall, and John Ruggie. The book contributes to this literature with new cases, new methods, and, most importantly, new theory. It is not an exaggeration to say that the volume is currently the state of the art piece that best illustrates the potential and limits of this research program. (At the same time, the book is a possible contribution to the new institutionalism and public choice debates—more precisely, to the arguments of those who consider that institutional theory and a theory of ideas are two sides of the same coin and who are paying close attention to the recent focus on belief systems, culture, and cognition announced by such luminaries as D. C. North and James Buchanan.)

In this work, one can find the elements of an original theoretical framework for the study of the relationships among ideas, government choice, and economic order. It is a theory based on individualism, contingency, and philosophic pragmatism. One quotation will be sufficient to convey the boldness of his approach: “I depart from much of the existing literature about ideas by asserting that … ultimately there are no systematic explanations of the selection of ideas. The freedom that inheres in individual minds means that the selection of new ideas is contingent, is undetermined, and can be described but not systematically explained. Considerable progress can be made if we recognize the contingent, if not stochastic, elements of idea selection, and if we cease the attempt to locate/embed the idea selection process systematically in other deep holistic structures—be they material, institutional, or cultural” (p. 12).

Darden is well aware that the position he advances “runs against two disciplinary instincts” in political science. The first is “the tendency to assume that everything is conducive to systematic explanation” and that “the only true explanation is one that identifies the relevant law-like, systematic relationship.” The second is the tendency to reject ideas as a cause and “to assume that there must be something deeper, some unseen or hidden interest or mechanism that selects both the behavior and the ideas actors use to justify it” (p. 313). That is to say, this book is not only an important contribution to postcommunist studies. It is also a deliberate attempt to chart a novel theoretical position that challenges current orthodoxies from the perspective of a scholarly tradition whose growth seems to have reached a new threshold of relevance.