The below review was posted to Amazon and Goodreads on 6/2/18:

I have for a long time been searching for the one perfect book that I can hand to someone who says to me, “hey, I don’t know anything about economics, but I would like to learn—is there a book you would recommend?” Economic Thought isn’t quite that, although I could do worse. Better? New Ideas From Dead Economists by Todd Buchholz, probably.

One advantage Kurz has over Buchholz is that he is more serious about grappling with Marx. Buchholz’s focuses on Marx’s personal life, an irrelevancy. And I don’t see how you can be glib considering the massive role Communism played in 20th century history and given the continuing influence of Marxism in academia (even if it has largely been banished from economics). But then Buchholz’s book has a heavy focus on economists, which both limits it and makes it more accessible than Kurz’s work. Kurz’s work, to its credit, digs deeper into the economic thought, which is what is really interesting to us, after all.

A few highlights: the coverage of work of Adam Smith, Schumpeter, and Keynes; Kurz’s efforts to divvy up economic thought and categorize eras (classical, marginalist, etc.); the breadth of his coverage (from Mises to Piketty); coverage of the foundations for public choice (Coase, Pigou, Arrow); and coverage of writers who might be considered more ancillary to economics (John Stuart Mill, Amartya Sen).

Economic Thought is a translation and the language can be a bit rough and stilted at times, although to be honest it isn’t any worse than the bulk of academic economic writing.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Economic Thought via NetGalley.