In the foreword of my edition Amartya Sen maintains that the passions / interests contrast analyzed here is more extraordinary than the "alleged conundrum" of unintended effects in market theory. That is a biased and preposterous statement. This book is just a review of selected 18th and 19th century classics in economic theory and political economy. The author has plowed through many books and duly recorded how the words "interest" and "passion" are used in each. He puts together a reasonable narrative for how this word usage developed and what it meant, but it still amounts to little more than a very partial history of economic thought.

Towards the end of the book the author draws his comparison to von Mises' and Hayek's market theory which seems to have inspired Sen's musings in the foreword. The author writes "Curiously, the intended but unrealized effects of social decisions stand in need of being discovered even more than those effects that were unintended but turn out to be all too real". Lo and behold, this actually smells like social theory. But the curious thing is that the author's preceding literature review does not in any way touch upon any "intended but unrealized effects"; what they are or how they might be discovered. Certainly the author can't be thinking that, by reading the works of 18th century philosophers, he has discovered what 18th century people intended with their actions?

In any case, this book is a brief but well-written piece of 18th and 19th century intellectual history. If the author intended it to be something else, the effects of that intention were not realized in my reading of the book.

The book explains the arguments for and against capitalism back when capitalism was still a new idea and back when people viewed capitalism as the sins of greed and usury. The book was, unfortunately, too boring to recommend. ( )

The curious economic philosophy that human variability and change-driven existence makes capitalism the most realistic economic philosophy ( )

The AUTHOR of _Exit, Voice, and Loyalty_ wrote this at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in NJ before leaving Harvard a few years later and spending the rest of his career at Princeton IoAS ( )