Against the Flow: Reflections of an Individualist by Samuel Brittan Atlantic Books 2005 304pp, 25 pounds ISBN 1843544377X Sir Samuel Brittan has long been regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s leading economic commentators. He has written an influential column for The Financial Times since 1966, had been awarded the George Orwell, Senior Harold Wincott and Ludwig Erhard prizes for his journalistic contributions, and received a knighthood in 1993 for his ‘services to economic journalism’. Brittan’s insatiable appetite for writing is also reflected in the publication of 12 books, including his new work Against the Flow which consists of 68 essays written since November 1999. One is immediately struck by the diversity of readings in this collection, ranging from foreign policy and international relations, British and European economic policy, social issues, political economy, to biographical essays on economists and philosophers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, John Maynard Keynes, Norman Angell, and Bertrand Russell. Apart from his willingness to commentate freely on issues that cross disciplinary boundaries, Brittan displays a rare gift for a certain elegance of expression whilst, at the same time, ensuring that his messages are unencumbered by complex technical jargon. He also manages to pull no punches against those notions with which he disagrees, providing a sprinkling of (scathing) humour in exposing a range of erroneous beliefs. For example, in his critique of NGO agitations for businesses to adopt a ‘stakeholder’ (corporate social responsibility) approach to their operations and reporting standards, Brittan notes that ‘… One enthusiast advocates that every company should have a ‘metaphysical director’ who could supposedly resolve conflicts of interest and value. This would indeed provide jobs for bogus philosophers’ (p. 85). Brittan undertakes some effort to dismantle a range of fallacies that are commonly accepted as ‘economic truth’. He provides a critical assessment of the populist support for high minimum wages (which ‘... contributes to unemployment and is a breach of the human right to make a contract for services from which both sides benefit’ [p. 94]), criticisms of the wealth distribution (‘… the usual statistics … exaggerate the concentration of wealth. … The weakness of such figures is that they are snapshot rather than lifetime comparisons’ [p. 101]), and the fear of cheap imports (‘… if countries such as China and India are prevented from competing on the basis of their most favourable temporary asset – namely cheap labour – their whole development will be delayed’ [p. 73]). In the realm of foreign policy, he castigates the popular view that there is a strong link between terrorism and poverty (pp. 18-19), and that the West needs to understand the underlying attitudinal bases of Islamic extremism with a view to appeasing terrorists to end their murderous campaign against the free world (pp. 4-5). The quality of the critical analysis of these and other issues is a key strength of Brittan’s Against the Flow. The book also provides a number of chapters covering a range of cutting-edge research themes, including complexity theory, evolutionary psychology, currency competition, the limits of macroeconomic forecasting, and the role of institutional rules in shaping the evolution of competitive markets. Brittan also emphasises the nature and limits of human knowledge, drawing on the work of Karl Popper and Hayek. These are important issues in economic and social theory, and Brittan is to be highly commended for canvassing these concepts for the benefit of a wider audience. However, with such an eclectic array of essays over a broad range of subject areas, a key drawback of this book is the appearance of a number of inconsistencies of argument. For example, Brittan describes himself as a ‘neo-pacifist’ (p. 9) in foreign policy, yet supports the United States and its allies, including Australia, in its prosecution of the war against terror (p. 5). He also argues that ‘… At this point of danger we cannot be too squeamish in our choice of allies’ (p. 5), yet he later attacks Western leaders involved in strategic military and trade partnerships with countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (p. 13). These inconsistencies tend to leave the reader none the wiser as to what Brittan’s foreign policy stance might be. On the economic side, there is some confusion within Against the Flow as to Brittan’s views on the desirability of macroeconomic targets as a policy instrument. Brittan warns against the utilisation of inflation targets during periods of rapid inflation (p. 160), and more broadly criticises policymakers who adopt macroeconomic policy targets for pretending to ‘… know more about the characteristics of the economy than we really do’ (p. 206). Yet elsewhere in the book Brittan advocates the adoption of nominal GDP as a policy target (p. 161). Putting aside the obvious problems posed by these inconsistencies, there remains considerable academic scepticism amongst even neoclassical economists regarding the feasibility of GDP targets and, further, from an Austrian economics perspective it could be regarded that an inordinate focus on national income accounting concepts (such as GDP) may bias policy towards focussing on increasing quantities of inputs and outputs in the production process, rather than on innovation and entrepreneurship that are the foundations of free competitive market processes (Randall G Holcombe, 2004, ‘National Income Accounting and Public Policy’, Review of Austrian Economics). More fundamentally, despite the claims that this book provides for a ‘robust defence of classical liberalism’, it is not at all clear that this is indeed the case. Brittan describes himself as a ‘redistributive market liberal’ (pp. xi, 86) who supports the notion of a guaranteed minimum income for all (pp. 91-97, 240), as well as extensive asset-based welfare (pp. 97-104). Brittan’s self-described ‘redistributive market liberalism’ is reminiscent of the ‘progressive liberalism’ label developed in a 1998 book by Australian economist Fred Argy, which was extensively critiqued in a previous edition of this journal by Wolfgang Kasper. Further, the welfare state concepts promulgated by Brittan have been variously embraced by left-wing groups such as the Australian Labor Party under Mark Latham, the Greens Party, and the Australia Institute. This raises an obvious question: can this work, in its totality, be regarded as a statement of classical liberalism, in the tradition of Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Smith, Bastiat, and Hayek? Perhaps not. All in all, Against the Flow represents a series of thought-provoking essays covering a panorama of contemporary economic, social and political issues. Against the Flow may not be the comprehensive tract in the classical liberal tradition that it is made out to be, and it does occasionally (at times critically) suffer from a lack of consistency, but it is nonetheless an interesting work which gives something for everyone together with some thrills and spills along the way. Reviewed by Julie Novak .