“There is no more important proposition for all kinds of historical research than . . . that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually reinterpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by reinterpretation and adjustment, in the process of which earlier meanings and purposes are necessarily obscured or completely eliminated.”
Thus spoke Nietzsche, in his Genealogy of Morality (essay 2, pt. 12). Tracing the way in which thinkers and their books are interpreted, reinterpreted, and altered across time and space is the characteristic concern of the genre of reception history. Glory M. Liu's book falls squarely into that genre.
Let us depart from the normal pattern of book reviews, and as befits a journal in the history of economic ideas, get to the bottom line. If you are interested in the history of political economy, this is a book you will probably want to...
