Economics as a Social Science: Civil Society and its Money. By Raimund Dietz. “Springer Studies in Alternative Economics.” Wiesbaden: Springer, 2024. pp xvii + 277. ISBN 978-3-658-45175-2 [$139.99]; e-book ISBN 978-3-658-45176-9 [$119.99]

The first four chapters of this book provide a thoughtful and imaginative methodological treatment of the challenges involved in treating economics as a social rather than as a decision science. The social sciences are plagued by our inability immediately to comprehend our objects of interest. We can comprehend those objects only through constructing models which we think captures the salient feature of reality, as Mary Morgan’s (2012) explains luminously in The World in the Model. The first four chapters of this book are an admirable effort to construe economics as a social science, similar to the intuitions that guided the thinkers responsible for the Scottish Enlightenment, and who largely have been cast aside in the modern age.

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