Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.

Review of Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp.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 HerrmannPillath'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.By this comment I do not mean to endorse HPB's view that what both the academy and the policy world need now is a general embrace of Hegelian economics. Nor am I about to repeat the experience, which I recall with a shudder from much younger days, of actually reading Hegel's Philosophy of right. But I will go this far: the authors make a compelling case for the proposition that Hegel is the most important fountainhead for a coherent set of ideas about both economic behavior and political economy that, when expressed in an idiom closer to that of contemporary social science, deserve to be represented in both methodological and policy debates. Furthermore, as I will explain, going beyond anything to which HPB allude, if someone thinks (as I did) that the current German model of capitalism is largely a path-dependent consequence of Bismarck's cunning in designing a welfare state that needed paternalistic oversight by a Junker aristocracy, then HPB's book reveals that that is wrong too, or at least simplistic. German-style capitalism has deep intellectual roots, and they can be found in Hegel.Before I get to economics, I will comment on HPB's basis for putting a convincing 21st-century gloss on Hegel's pure philosophy, which, as someone trained by analytic philosophers, I had previously found utterly archaic. Hegel, famously, goes on constantly about spirit, and, even more off-puttingly, about a kind of spirit he calls objective. This phrase smells like mysticism and, in its 19th-century context, nationalism to boot. Liberal cosmopolitan economists like me can hardly imagine a more repugnant mixture than that. But HPB make a convincing case that objective spirit is in fact Hegel's pre-Darwinian name for an element of the ontological furniture that so-called externalist philosophers of mind, following Tyler Burge (1986), Daniel Dennett (1987), Edwin Hutchins (1995), Ron McClamrock (1995), Andy Clark (1997), Radu Bogdan (1997, 2000, 2009, 2010, 2013), and Tad Zawidzki (2013), have established as central to an adequate science of human behavior: the socially scaffolded but primarily self-narrated person. I have argued repeatedly-but see especially Ross (2005, 2014)- that the standard story economists tell about the philosophical foundations of their most important theoretical concept, economic agency as inferred from revealed preference, snaps in a satisfying gestalt switch from incoherence to rich profundity if only one distinguishes such socially scaffolded but richly individuated people from the neural computers studied by psychologists and neuroscientists. Only then can we understand how preference consistency is stabilized as an achievement that simultaneously embeds normative individualism and identification with points in complex vector spaces of social markers. The relevant concept to replace the mind-as-internal-computer has unfortunately been established in the literature under the label of the 'extended mind' (Menary 2010). Since this suggests that the mind begins as an internal computer that is then accessorized, in terms of connotations the label is not much of an improvement on 'objective spirit'. …