The inexact and separate science of economics: by D. M. Hausman, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 2nd edition Cambridge, UK, $44.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9781009320276, Length: 450 pages

Abstract

I bought my copy of the first edition of The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics in 1998 at the Economists Bookshop at the LSE. That shop is long gone, and my paperback copy has fallen apart into individual pages. But the pink highlighter on passages I saw as significant is still visible. On the margins I translated into my native language words like ‘modal’, ‘counterfactual’, and ‘bootstrapping’. Those were strange pieces of vocabulary of the then new to me philosophy of science. Translating them into Russian did not exactly clarify things. I only understood these words when I learned to use them myself, which didn’t happen for ages. But it was the first analytic philosophy book I owned, the most consequential of all the textbooks on my shelf, and it bears the signs of my earnest attempts to enter that world.