Imagining Interest in Political Thought: Origins of Economic
Rationality, Stephen G. Engelmann, Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2003, pp. x, 194
This always fascinating but sometimes frustrating volume undertakes to
trace the natural history of what its author calls
neo-liberalism, meaning the kind of economic analysis and
approach to governance practiced by such denizens of the Chicago school as
Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker and appeals court Justice Richard Posner. A
professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Engelmann contends
that this mode of analysis grew out of a way of thinking that was brought
to maturity by Jeremy Bentham but had already begun to take root in
Cromwell's England.