A GALAXY OF brilliant scholars have tried to account for the economic transformation of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries—the period that began the Great Enrichment that created the modern world. What could Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s The Wealth of a Nation add to this mountain of scholarship and disputation?
Quite a lot. Building on his earlier work, especially 2015’s Conceptualising Capitalism, the British economist argues that the Great Enrichment and the associated rise of liberalism stemmed from institutional change, particularly a legal and political system that protects property and contracts and provides a secure space for individual enterprise. He combines that view (which owes much to the Nobel-winning economist Douglass North) with a redefinition of capital and capitalism, where he draws on Joseph Schumpeter, Thorstein Veblen, and other heterodox economists.
Hodgson criticizes the definition of used by the great majority of economists and
