Roger E. Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard, and Tamotsu Nishizawa, eds., Welfare Theory, Public Action, and Ethical Values: Revisiting the History of Welfare Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. ix + 338, £75 (hardcover). ISBN: 9781108841450.

Abstract

This collective book edited by Roger E. Backhouse, Antoinette Baujard, and Tamotsu Nishizawa is a valuable outcome from the ongoing project “Welfare Economists and the Welfare State in Historical Perspective,” which also gave rise to several workshops between 2013 and 2017. It brings together thirteen chapters with a substantial introduction and conclusion by the three editors. It is a book that proposes a thesis, a rare and difficult achievement for a collective work. Specifically, the claim made in the book is the following: “whether we are talking about old, new or contemporary welfare economics, when economists have tackled practical problems, they have adopted a much broader range of ethical judgements beyond welfarism” (p. 1). To better understand the stakes and the scope of this claim, one may turn to Philippe Mongin (2002), whose famous essay “Is There Progress in Normative Economics?” is a reference to the history of welfare economics. Mongin proposes in particular to distinguish several stages in the history of welfare economics (on this subject, see also Baujard 2016): while the first stage corresponds to the first welfare economics and the second stage corresponds to the new welfare economics, “the third stage corresponds roughly to two different forms of normative economics, that is, social choice theory on the one hand, and public economics on the other” (Mongin 2002, p. 147). Having stated this, he adds: