Review of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev’s Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social.

The most fun an academic can have, at least on the job, comes from encountering a package of ideas one never expected to see that turn out to be deep and interesting. If, before I encountered Carsten Herrmann-Pillath’s and Ivan Boldyrev’s (henceforth, HPB) joint work at a conference two years ago, I had been asked to list canonical dead philosophers whose work might inspire fresh insights about current issues in economic methodology, I would have put Hegel near the bottom. Imagine anyone being so muddled about economic reasoning that that they could be set straight(er) by Marx! HPB’s new book convinces me that this would have been a completely misjudged expectation.