DOI: 10.46298/jpe.19367 ISSN: 1844-8208

Review of Roger E. Backhouse, The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edition, Princeton and Oxford, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2024, x + 471 pp., pb, ISBN 978-0-691-25201-8

Alexandru Patruti
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When first opening Professor Backhouse’s book ‘The Ordinary Business of Life: A History of Economics from the Ancient World to the Twenty-First Century’ the reader is struck by the claims made in the prologue: ‘This book is about the history of attempts to understand economic phenomena. […] It is not, except incidentally, concerned with the economic phenomena themselves but with the ways in which people have tried to make sense of them’ (p. 1). The author attempts to tell the story of economic ideas within a rather broad historical setting, given that he considers that ‘The history of economics has therefore to touch on the histories of religion, theology, philosophy, mathematics and science, as well as economics and politics’ (p. 2). Even more intriguing, Backhouse goes further to suggest that he does not wish to organize the content around great figures (i.e. Smith, Marx, Keynes, etc.) (p. 9), that he attempts to focus ‘on communities and circumstances out of which economic ideas emerged, rather than simply on individuals’ (p. 10), and that he is not comfortable around concepts such as ‘schools of thought’ (p. 11).

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