How Economics Should Be Complicated

This volume brings together select texts representative of the full range of intellectual output of one of the greatest and most eclectic economists of our time, Albert O. Hirschman. Covering a time span of over forty years, they recall his most prominent books and include many additional themes taken from essays of wide-ranging origin and content. The title How Economics Should Be Complicated has the dual sense of an endpoint and a central and recurrent theme in the author’s experience, which unfolds in his critical—but constructive—relationship with economic theory, his openness to other social sciences and his democratic and "possibilist" political inspiration. This stands as the basis of an important lesson in intellectual rebirth.