Choose any two of these three topics: race, liberalism, and economics. Now trace the connections between the two that you have chosen over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, incorporating both fundamental philosophical concepts and policy implications. Doing this could easily produce a large, multi-volume study. This book attempts to take on all three of these topics in this very ambitious way. The book succeeds in being surprising, enlightening, and provocative, though it suffers from some minor shortcomings typical of collective volumes of this type.

The genesis of the book was a conference held at Middlebury College, and the 11 main chapters in the book are revised versions of papers presented at the conference. The conference itself was “provoked” (the editors' term) by David Levy's work, both in sole-authored papers and in papers co-authored with Sandra Peart, on the place of race (and racism) in the history of economic thought. In a nutshell, that work argues that the “classical liberal” economists of the 1800s were fundamentally antiracist in that they emphasized human homogeneity and trusted in the market to allow all humans of all backgrounds to pursue their desires. Moreover, Levy and Peart argue that the twentieth-century Chicago-style revival of classical liberalism is also innately antiracist. “Modern liberal” or paternalist thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are seen to be fundamentally racist in that their promotion of paternalistic market regulation is consistent with a belief in the basic inferiority of some groups.

The 11 chapters are organized into three sections: one on “Classical Economics and Early Approaches to Race,” one on “Neoclassical and Modern Approaches to Racism,” and one on “Policy Issues.”

The first section is the most coherent and most closely tied to the central themes of the conference. It includes a survey of views of race in the natural sciences between 1700 and 1900 by Brendan O'Flaherty and Jill S. Shapiro, a paper by Levy and Peart on race in classical liberal and modern liberal economic thought, and responses to Levy and Peart by Susan Zlotnick and by Falguni A. Sheth. The O'Flaherty and Shapiro chapter provides valuable context for the rest of the book. Among other things, it examines two questions at the center of the book's themes: Is “race” an innate, biological category, and does our understanding of race necessarily improve over time through better evidence and competition in the “marketplace of ideas”? The authors answer “No” to both questions.

Levy and Peart and their respondents then examine how various views of race correspond to different views of the functioning of markets. Levy and Peart trumpet John Stuart Mill as their primary champion of a classically liberal view of the economy and also of a homogeneous, nonracial view of humanity. They argue that other thinkers of the age, including noneconomists such as Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, were fundamentally racist because their support for “paternalist” economic reforms presumed that there were “victims” of the operation of free markets who needed help, and that those victims must have been inherently inferior. Zlotnick and Sheth each argue that these thinkers had much more complex views both of markets and of race than Levy and Peart allow. Just as natural scientists have debated the genetic basis for racial categories, these authors are debating whether there is something “genetically” antiracist about classical liberalism and related economic thought and something “genetically” racist about paternalist, modern liberalism, or whether these connections vary across thinkers and over time. Levy and Peart clearly want to argue for an innate connection, but Zlotnick's and Sheth's criticisms are persuasive.

The second section focuses on twentieth-century economic writing on race, both theoretical and empirical. It includes a second paper by Peart and Levy, here examining the influence of eugenics on early neoclassical economists, as well as a review of economic theories of discrimination by Robert E. Prasch, a review of empirical studies of racial inequality by William A. Darity Jr. and Patrick L. Mason, an essay on racial inequality and justice by Marcellus Andrews, and Glenn C. Loury's response to some of the critics of his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). These chapters do not cohere as well as those in the first section. In various ways, though, most of these essays touch on the “vicious circle” concept of racial inequality most closely identified with Gunnar Myrdal's work An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Pantheon, [1944] 1962). In this view, preconceptions about the inferiority of blacks produce a limitation on the employment and educational opportunities made available to them, and this limitation then produces poor outcomes for blacks, which are taken as evidence of their innate inferiority. Loury's chapter, although on its face somewhat tangential to the core of the book, expresses the power of this idea most clearly. The concept also turns up (too briefly) in Prasch's chapter and in Darity and Mason's. Levy and Peart's arguments never fully engage with this notion that markets may not be good tools for eradicating discrimination when different initial market outcomes produce subsequent “pre-market” discrimination and inequality in skill acquisition. This phenomenon—in which differences that result from market processes are misinterpreted as innate—connects nicely to the views of race presented in the O'Flaherty and Shapiro chapter and to the themes of the first section. However, these connections are not emphasized and expanded as much as they ought to be, probably due to the nature of the book as a collection of conference papers.

The final section includes two papers, one by David Colander and one by Vanita Gowda and Brendan O'Flaherty, that attempt to examine the policy implications of the ideas discussed in the prior chapters. Colander argues that modern liberals should be less suspicious of the racial views of economists who write in the Chicago tradition. He thinks that the failure of modern liberals to recognize the pragmatic power of policies that emphasize market incentives arises from the failure of the proponents of such policies (Chicago-style economists) to recognize the moral nature of questions about racial inequality. Colander supports, among other things, the use of policies that are racially blind but that harness market forces to aid blacks and other disadvantaged groups in indirect ways. Gowda and O'Flaherty then present an unusual example of such a policy. They argue that the government should take a more neutral, less restrictive stance toward the development and use of better, healthier “recreational” drugs. The effect would be to reduce the pernicious health effects and violent externalities of the current illicit drug trade. As these problems (especially the latter) are particularly present in black communities, such a policy would have disproportionate benefit to blacks.

In sum, this book is somewhat sprawling in terms of the issues it tries to address, and some of the common themes that are present tend to fall into the cracks between chapters. It is, however, a very provocative and engaging collection of papers, all of which are exceptionally well written and accessible to nonspecialists. It achieves the goal of the editors: to make us think deeply about race, liberalism, economics, and the connections between them.