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How Society Makes Itself: The Evolution of Political and Economic Institutions.

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How Society Makes Itself: The Evolution of Political and Economic Institutions, By Howard J. Sherman. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. 2005.

How and why do social institutions change? This is the organizing question addressed by Howard J. Sherman in How Society Makes Itself: The Evolution of Political and Economic Institutions. Sherman's organizing framework revolves around four aspects or pillars of society: technology, economic institutions, social institutions, and ideology. He relies on this framework to demonstrate the interdependence of these four pillars in describing and explaining the evolution of society from prehistoric communalism to the global capitalism of today.

Sherman acknowledges in the preface that the book is written for a broad audience rather than for experts, in part, because evolutionary institutional change affects everyone thus, we should all be interested (p. ix). Sherman admirably balances the trade-off between breadth and depth to deliver and interesting and useful book. Experts likely can benefit from this multidisciplinary introduction to social evolution. Nonetheless, this book is well suited as a complementary text for introductory courses that seek to expose students to economic history and the evolutionary approach to the study of economics. The text seems most appropriate for economic history, political economy, and general economics courses.

Sherman presents the...

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