From one of the nation's preeminent experts on economic policy, a major reassessment of the foundations of modern economic thinking the explores the profound influence of an until-now unrecognized force-religion.
Critics of contemporary economics complain that belief in free markets-among economists as well as many ordinary citizens-is a form of religion. And, it turns out, that in a deeper, more historically grounded sense there is something to that idea. Contrary to the conventional historical view of economics as an entirely secular product of the Enlightenment, Benjamin M. Friedman demonstrates that religion exerted a powerful influence from the outset. Friedman makes clear how the foundational transition in thinking about what we now call economics, beginning in the eighteenth century, was decisively shaped by the hotly contended lines of religious thought within the English-speaking Protestant world. Beliefs about God-given human character, about...