LAUSR

Benjamin Cohen some years ago argued that there was a transatlantic divide in political economy, and Politics as a Peculiar Business by Richard Wagner illustrates this divide rather well. Taking political economy to be directly related to public choice economics, Wagner starts from an argument that an understanding of entrepreneurship and business practice can tell us much about the sphere of politics. However, recognising that this might suggest a bifurcation that would remove a meaningful idea of political economy, Wagner introduces the idea of entangled political economy, which he distinguishes from an additive approach. He argues that this is like the difference between an account of a parade (ordered/sequentialinteractions) and a crowd (complex/multiple interactions), and as such, his approach – while located within a ‘Virginia’ perspective of public choice and rationality – adds to this some recognition of system-like characteristics. This is then developed through a discussion of the constitutional politics and economic system of the United States, with the intention of understanding how individuals acting in complex entanglements structure and shift the political economy as found rather than as theorised. At one point in the book, stressing that entangled political economy is transactional, Wagner introduces the idea of the ‘art of the deal’ to depict the political processes he wishes to highlight. Given Donald Trump’s recent election as President this is an interesting and perhaps prescient move. As with much economically derived political economy, this book is dependent for much of its ‘empirical’ detail on the stylised facts of mainstream economics. Thus, in the words of the old proverb, if you want to get there, I wouldn’t start from here. Wagner’s problem really is that while there is much of interest in this volume, by starting with Virginia political economy (and retaining an economics-related perspective on argumentation, albeit without the maths), he has forced himself to develop a complicated argument to deliver the sort of pluralist approach that European political economy, not shackled by his theoretical and analytical commitments, often delivers more succinctly and with less effort. Conversely, the public choice element allows Wagner to develop an extended discussion of electoral politics that in Europe would mostly be sidelined within political economy in anything other than a rather materialistic analysis. Thus, Wagner’s work offers an interesting complement to European political economy and as such deserves attention for the questions it raises about the foci of any political economy approach.