By Joakim Book

The Berkeley economist Brad DeLong hates Friedrich Hayek — that much is clear from his oversized 536-page tome, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, 25 years in the making. And that’s also about the level of scholarship we can expect. The key ingredients in this politically slanted misinterpretation of the “long” century, 1870 to 2010, are taunts, insults, and extreme value judgments. In the first five pages no less, Hayek is both demoted to a “mere” moral philosopher and explicitly called an “extraordinary idiot” — only to be resurrected as “a genius” towards the end of DeLong’s excruciating narrative. It’s anybody’s guess why.

The book inches forward with long asides and biography paragraphs for characters as unremarkable as the man who brought Hitler into his political party. The kindest thing one can say about DeLong’s occasionally humorous rants is that the book’s subtitle is misplaced: This is not an economic history of anything, but a political and ideological one.

An economic history of the 1940s, say, would involve production, government wartime dirigisme, debt financing, and postwar inflation. It would consider the faulty notion that big government wartime spending brought depressed economies out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Instead, what DeLong delivers is a dull, textbook-type account of Britain and Germany’s warmongering. It’s the old-fashioned “maps and chaps” type of history — that aristocratic British flavor of academic investigations that look at all the wrong things (warfare, diplomatic correspondence, voting, or politicking).

Western governments of the........

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