This is a valuable book, the subject of which is the grand sweep of twentieth-century British economic ideology from the standpoint of its crucial historical and biographical contexts. In particular, it is an account of the lives, views, and influences of John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), Harold Laski (1893–1950), and Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) on the general question of the relationship between the state and the economy. It will have particular significance for social scientists studying this subject or period in British history. It will also be interesting to those interested more generally in the formation of political and ideological commitments and identity in the world of ideas. Kenneth R. Hoover's subject is wide and our space short. I will concentrate on Laski and Hayek, given the existence of much more scholarship on the subject of Keynes.

Hoover attempts to be systematic about the process by which identity and socialization occurs, emphasizing the early development of competencies, identification with and/or opposition to social groups, and the power of social and personal commitments. In some sense the author stresses too much this “theory of lives,” especially as a definitive analysis arising from the field of political identity formation. I say this only to emphasize the necessarily open-ended nature of biography to tell a coherent story. It is only a misplaced “scientism” that would claim otherwise, if unfortunately understandable in the world of modern social science. This interesting story can stand on its own, without appeal to being the only story.

Laski was the son of a prominent Jewish manufacturing family in Victorian Manchester. His youthful political interests were partly fueled by frequent visits to the family home of a young Liberal politician out to cultivate the “Jewish vote,” Winston Churchill. Laski, who would later be the Tory Churchill's political archenemy, was fascinated to watch the famous orator practice his speeches in front of the bedroom mirror.

Laski's early life is characterized by Hoover as a rebellion against this upbringing. He rejected his faith, disowned his family's politics, and ran off to Scotland at age eighteen to secretly marry a gentile woman, eight years his elder, and of “radical” politics (she was a eugenicist and massage therapist!). Family uproar ensued, and the two were separated for an agreed upon three-year delay in their marriage until Laski finished his degree at Oxford (a First Class in history). He was then cut off from the family, a break that was never to be reconciled. There followed rejection from war duty (too sickly), the call by Oxford to enter academics in Canada, shortly followed by a sojourn to Harvard (1916–20), and the return to England and the London School of Economics (LSE), where he was appointed to the position of professor of political science, a position he retained for the rest of his life. Besides the LSE position, which gave him international prominence, Hoover emphasizes the family and religious ostracism, which gave him a critical perspective on conventional social relations, but also the lifelong commitment by both him and his wife, Frida, to each other and to combining married life with Labour politics, as the formative influences on Laski's career.

From this position, and by the force of his teaching (he was something of a rock star to the students at the LSE in the thirties), extensive writing, and public speaking, especially to political groups, Laski had a major influence on the substance, style, and very staffing of the British Labour party. So much so, that by the time it had come to real power in the crucial election of 1945, a full sixty-seven of the 393 Labour MPs seated were former students of Laski’s. Tellingly, that same year his inability to move from the perspective of the outsider and critic saw him isolated in the now governing Labour hierarchy, and his fall from power in the party to the more politically astute Atlee. In the next year he was to have his fighting spirit broken by losing a very public libel trial against McCarthy-like slander in the newspapers and was dead by 1950. What went wrong? See the book for the details.

Hayek, who had seen the idyll of his comfortable Austrian childhood shattered by the social traumas that shook the losing side in the post–World War I era, came to equate all forms of social control with totalitarianism. Yet it was his technical monetary theory that gained the attention of Lionel Robbins in the early thirties, then trying to build a counterweight to the traditional dominance of Cambridge over British economics. Thus did Hayek emigrate London in 1931, to an office across the hall from Laski at the LSE, until the end of World War II. He became an Anglophile. Yet the move also destined him for some very unhappy times it seems. First, his marriage (including two children) was dissolving, setting up the personal crisis over which he later broke with Robbins and which took him to America in the fifties. Second, he was dropped into the middle of an ideological and academic battle with Laski, for which he was totally unsuited. Finally, he crossed swords with Keynes and lost, in a theoretical duel over the answer to the enigma of the times, the economic explanation of the slump.

The biographical puzzle of Hayek is how he fled from all of this to a life as a somewhat shunned and itinerant scholar of the philosophy of libertarianism, a position for which he has been hailed as a prophet of the new right only in more modern times, but was for much of his career equally shunned by others. Hoover's explanation, to be brief, is that he found himself on the losing end of the political struggle at the LSE and in Britain generally, that his economic following disappeared before the dominance of Keynes's General Theory, and that he found himself trapped in one unhappy marriage and yearning for escape to another. This called forth new commitments, the appeal to new communities, particularly American business interests, and new scholarly competencies.