Kirzner on Ebenstein
From the new issue of The NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, Israel Kirzner reviews Alan Ebenstein's Hayek's Journey (Palgrave, 2003): "(a) Ebenstein’s treatment of several key economic concepts, especially in the history of Austrian Economics, is imprecise or unclear: The treatment of diminishing marginal utility, opportunity cost, Mises’s version of the Austrian tradecycle theory, the relationship between Hayek’s celebrated papers on the role of knowledge in market processes and his work on The Abuse of Reason in the history of social sciences, and his references to the Salerno-Rothbard thesis on the 'dehomogenization' of Mises and Hayek. (b) Many admittedly trivial, but troubling, infelicities also mar the book. Ebenstein seems unaware that economic history is not identical to the history of economics. Historians of economic thought are, in economics literature, not generally referred to as “economic historians� as they are throughout this book. Shackle’s name is misspelled both in the text and in the Index. A number of chapter titles in the book are highly inept indicators of those chapters’ content. (c) A number of the judgments scattered across the book seem at best arbitrary...."
