Lawrence H White The clash of economic ideas: The great policy debates and experiments of the last hundred years New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 428pp., £30.00 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-10762133-6The history of modern economic thought-like that of many of the social sciences -has been characterized by long periods of consensus punctuated by paradigm reversals and the rise of new orthodoxies. Outside of each consensus, there remain the dissenters, skeptics, and critics, some of whom are lucky enough eventually to receive their day of vindication when the new paradigm takes its place. Thus, the history of twentieth-century economic thought can be written in terms of the debate between laissez-faire, on the one hand, and the mixed economy, socialism, or some other variant of central planning, on the other, with different economic theories holding sway depending upon changing historical circumstances. Lawrence White resurrects the personalities and ideas behind these debates and situates them in the nineteenth-century intellectual traditions that influenced them. Although the book's non-linear (slightly scattered) narrative is meant to appeal to a younger audience, The Clash of Economic Ideas has broad appeal, even if one does not agree with the book's central purpose, which, in an age of austerity and financial crisis, is to demonstrate the superiority of laissez-faire in delivering prosperity (10) over all other systems of economic organization. Let's be clear, White tells us: there is still no alternative.In White's retelling, those economists rooted in the classical liberal tradition, particularly the Austrians and their ilk-Hayek, Mises, and Friedman-were the iconoclasts of the twentieth century who battled it out against the arrogant and wrongheaded advice of heretics from all sides, including development economists, socialists, Keynesians, populists, German historicists, and American institutionalists. With the great inflation of the 1970s, Hayek's Mont Pelerin society finally enjoyed its day in the sun as policymakers and economists rejected much of the Keynesian conceptual apparatus, although the new consensus never achieved the level of ideological purity that would have satisfied its most ardent proponents (and of particular concern to White, economists like Paul Krugman continue to preach the virtues of Keynesianism to a largely receptive public). If the reader can bear the tedium of following the same predictable drama across different settings and with shifting theoretical focus in each of the book's 15 chapters, she will at least be rewarded with a fairly accessible account of some of the key concepts that have shaped contemporary economic thought. White is good at explaining abstract ideas, and his book provides a useful reference guide to everything from the gold standard to the Bretton Woods system, from the quantity theory of money to the Keynesian multiplier.In his haste to entrench laissez-faire as the only credible paradigm, however, White leaves out historical details that call into question the philosophical foundation of the classical liberal tradition he so staunchly defends-the notion that unfettered capitalism is the handmaiden of freedom and liberty. Paraphrasing Hayek, he argues that centralized planning will lead any government trying to make [it] work down a slippery slope to political repression (100). While acknowledging that regulatory measures and central planning responded to popular demands, he suggests these merely reflected special interests rather than legitimate reactions to the ravages of the market. …