R arely does a book have the power to improve economists' fundamental vision of their subject.
Frank Machovec's Perfect Competition and the Transformation of Economics is such a book. Most economists will feel the same about Machovec's work. It is genuinely exciting, one of the most important works in economics published in the past 10 years. Machovec's thesis is that the profession's embracing of perfect competition constituted a Kuhnian revolution in which, tragically, the superior conception of competition as rivalry was overthrown. He establishes, first, that rivalrous competition dominated economics from the classical period to the early 20th century but that perfect competition dominates it now.