Oskar Morgenstern on James Bonar’s The Tables Turned (1927)

Oskar Morgenstern’s short German review praises Bonar’s lecture and dialogue on Adam Smith for combining historical scholarship with literary inventiveness. Its central judgment is that economic writing can be both learned and engaging, and that appreciation of the classical economists requires historical perspective rather than doctrinal allegiance.

Es geschieht nicht häufig, daß einem ein solches Buch beschert wird.

English translation: It does not happen often that one is presented with such a book.

This enthusiastic opening frames a precise assessment of Bonar’s achievement: in fifty-two pages, he examines the classical economists’ problems, the historical circumstances of their proposed solutions, and their continuing relevance. Morgenstern connects this compression to the work’s unusual structure. A twenty-page London University lecture is followed by an imaginary conversation in Elysium, where Smith encounters Ricardo, J. S. Mill, Marx, Marshall, Malthus, Cairnes, and others. The dialogue asks what The Wealth of Nations can still contribute when new problems demand attention and newer theories better explain familiar phenomena. Free trade, the world economy, trade unions, wage policy, population, and theories of impoverishment supply its range of examples.

Morgenstern’s praise does not imply that classical economics remains sufficient for the present. He emphasizes Bonar’s freedom from dogmatism: affection for the classical thinkers coexists with recognition that their intellectual supremacy has passed. The review’s substantive conclusion explains why supersession need not entail dismissal:

Versuchen wir aber die geschichtliche und geistige Lage, die politischen und wirtschaftlichen Probleme des Zeitalters der klassischen Theoretiker zu erfassen, wozu uns Dr. Bonars Arbeiten immer schon in besonderer Weise verholfen haben, so wird es möglich sein, das klassische System in rechter Perspektive zu sehen und wir werden nicht zu einer Unterschätzung ihrer Leistungen kommen, lediglich weil sie für uns nicht mehr genügen.

English translation: If, however, we attempt to grasp the historical and intellectual situation, the political and economic problems of the age of the classical theorists — to which Dr. Bonar's works have always helped us in a special way — then it will be possible to see the classical system in its proper perspective, and we shall not arrive at an underestimation of their achievements merely because they no longer suffice for us.

Historical understanding thus distinguishes a theory’s present adequacy from the magnitude of its original achievement. Morgenstern then turns the same perspective upon contemporary economics:

Auch die gegenwärtige Generation wird einmal der Vergangenheit angehören, mit den Fragen, die sie beschäftigen, und mit den Antworten, die sie zu geben versucht.

English translation: The present generation too will one day belong to the past, together with the questions that occupy it and with the answers it attempts to give.

This final conceptual move makes the review more than a recommendation of an entertaining book. The present, too, has historically situated questions and provisional answers. Morgenstern values Bonar’s imaginative form because it makes this relationship between past achievement and present limitation intellectually vivid; his closing wish for a wide readership joins pleasure in the presentation to appreciation of its substance.