The relationship between heterodox economics and the history of economic thought is close but also complicated. Heterodox economists have always taken some interest in the history of ideas, if only because they reject the mainstream dogma of the continuing, endless progress of the economics discipline. Seeing instead many periods of stagnation and retrogression, heterodox economists are bound to ask themselves how, when, and why things went wrong, since the answers to these questions may throw light on what is needed to put them right. Historians of economic thought, for their part, even if they are broadly favorable to mainstream ideas, cannot fail to be interested in the alternatives, and the reasons for their failure.

Thus the book under review has much that will interest readers of this journal, even though only one of the editors (Sheila Dow) is herself a specialist intellectual historian, and despite the unfortunate misuse of the word “contemporary” in the title. It contains papers presented at a 2016 conference held to honor the eminent Post-Keynesian macroeconomic theorist Victoria Chick, who was born in the same year that Macmillan brought John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory into the world. While only one of the thirteen chapters counts as history of economic thought in the narrow sense (Mogens Ove Madsen’s chapter 10, “Hicks’s Progress from Statics to Historical Time”), several others do contain material of great interest to historians of ideas. The opening chapter, “Monetary Regimes, Then and Now,” by Charles Goodhart, compares David Ricardo’s views on monetary policy with those of mainstream economists in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. Goodhart’s final words pose an interesting question: “What would Ricardo have advocated?” in 2007–08 (p. 10). Geoff Tily’s chapter has a very short title: “Keynes Applied,” by which he means the use of Keynes’s approach to monetary policy to dissect both the inflation of the 1970s and the debt deflation of the early twenty-first century.

Roy Rotheim’s chapter 3, “Rethinking Monetary Restraint,” cites a number of Post-Keynesian theorists from the 1960s and 1970s to emphasize the macroeconomic significance of debt and the consequences of its neglect by far too many mainstream macroeconomists. The next two chapters have a more contemporary (sorry, I meant “recent past and/or current”) focus. In chapter 4 Penelope Hawkins explains the 2014 failure of African Bank, followed by Jayati Ghosh’s analysis of financial fragility in Asia and by Sunanda Sen’s account of shadow banking in India. There is a little more on the history of ideas in Rogerio Studart’s chapter 7, which offers a Post-Keynesian perspective on global sustainable development, and in chapter 8, where Carlos J. Rodriguez-Fuentes provides a personal interpretation of Victoria Chick’s own monetary thought.

As the editors explain (pp. xix–xxii), the second, subsidiary, emphasis of the book is on the methodology of economics, and here too the relationship of the subject to the history of thought is rather complicated. Intellectual historians have always taken some interest in methodological questions, since they often play an important role in explaining the development (or non-development) of economic ideas. But many of them would be reluctant to accept the strong criticisms of mainstream thinking on these issues that is almost mandatory for those of a heterodox persuasion. In this volume there are two chapters with a strong methodological focus. In chapter 9 Bert Tieben offers a thought-provoking account of the relationship between equilibrium and uncertainty, drawing on the work not only of Keynes and Chick but also of Israel Kirzner and George Shackle. This is followed by the previously mentioned paper by Madsen, who concludes that it “was a lifelong effort for Hicks to add an element of humanity to economic theory and thus bring it closer to economic reality,” leading him (Hicks) to conclude that “static theories have a very limited purpose” (p. 131).

The next chapter, a formal model of underemployment equilibrium with flexible wages and prices by Angel Asensio, has little or no history of ideas. Ironically, Victoria Chick’s own contribution (chapter 12, co-authored with Alan Freeman) is also one of those with the least history of thought content, as can be seen from the title: “The Economics of Enough: A Future for Capitalism or a New Way of Living?” Similarly there is little or no history of ideas in the final chapter by Robert McMaster, who asks whether Post-Keynesian economics needs a theory of care (and answers in the affirmative). There is, however, a brief account of Kenneth Boulding’s position on the “overlapping value systems that compose an overarching social provisioning system” (p. 164). I suspect that other readers with different interests will find more brief references to the history of thought in what is a wide-ranging and very readable volume.