G. L. S. Shackle, “[Review of Economic Theory and Method]” (May 1956)

Shackle’s review of F. Zeuthen’s Economic Theory and Method presents the book as an unusually rich guide to modern economic theory, valuable both to economists catching up with the literature and to able advanced undergraduates. His praise rests on its combination of conceptual breadth, clear exposition, and extensive references, while his reservations concern the treatment of mathematical determinacy and the unsettled state of dynamics.

The review moves from the book’s material and pedagogical resources to its four-part intellectual structure. Shackle admires its production, sixty-four chapters, and forty-six diagrams, but gives particular weight to footnotes that both identify recent original sources and summarize their arguments. These make the textbook a route into research rather than merely a condensed statement of received doctrine.

The book is in effect a compact encyclopædia of modern economic theory with a continental, as distinct from a Marshallian, approach.

For Shackle, this distinction involves the place of economics within wider reflection on human life. He singles out the opening forty pages on the nature and pursuit of theoretical insight, resisting the assumption that methodological reflection is dispensable.

Many English teachers will advise their students to skip this, and their advice will be bad.

His judgment of Part Two is similarly pedagogical: its elementary exposition of the Walrasian system is the clearest he has encountered, especially in conveying economic interdependence as a lesson students should internalize early. He nevertheless objects to its overly bald suggestion that equality between the numbers of equations and unknowns is always both necessary and sufficient for determinacy.

Part Three’s survey of orthodox dynamics exposes a deeper tension. Its brevity sometimes prevents independent comprehension, though references permit further exploration. More significantly, Shackle’s image of temporary huts around the ruined static Acropolis suggests that the field’s dynamic constructions have not achieved the coherence or authority of its static architecture.

The traveller may reflect that time is not finished yet, and will perhaps have its revenge.

This remark gives the review its sharpest conceptual edge: time remains a challenge to economic theory, not simply another topic to be accommodated within an established system. Shackle then credits Part Four, on market forms and social structure, with particular distinction because it treats an area of Zeuthen’s own major contributions.

The closing assessment returns to teaching. Zeuthen’s mathematical training informs the reasoning without burdening the exposition with conspicuous apparatus. Against teachers who leave too much unexplained, Shackle commends a demanding but unusually supportive text. The review’s enduring interest lies in its standards for theoretical education: intellectual context, explicit explanation, awareness of interdependence, and access to the original literature, coupled with recognition that dynamics remains unfinished business.