A review of Till Düppe ’ s The making of the economy : a phenomenology of economic science . Plymouth : Lexington Books , 2011 , 241 pp . A

As its subtitle indicates, this book is a reflection on the idea of economics as “science” from the vantage point of the phenomenological tradition in philosophy. Düppe asks a two sided question: what in the life-world creates the opportunity for the expertise that might go by the name of “economic science”; and what interests have led would-be economists to respond. The book is very interesting from a number of vantage points within economics itself, giving depth and perspective to themes in the history of economics, to economic theory and methodology, and to contemporary conversations about what “economics” is (or is not). Philosophy, it turns out, can still yield useful insights, and this book yields an abundance of them. Düppe begins the book with Husserl’s critique of modern science as an enterprise that forgets the primal, existentialist meaning-making character of thought/theory. He argues that in economics this forgetting happens through a ‘formalism’ (of theory) and a ‘structuralism’ (of economy). He then goes on, in the second part of the book, to perform a phenomenological scan (details to follow) on various chapters of the history of economic discourse, starting with the case of oikovoμia (economic life without “economics”) and ending with the current state of affairs, in which he sees a dissolution of “economic science”. Düppe approves of this dissolution, seeing in it a victory of the phenomenological instinct; seeing in it, that is, the possibility for