This is a deeply academic book on the history of economic thought, Marxist economics, neoclassical orthodoxies, and institutional economics. It is also a personal odyssey of discovery based on the evolution of the author’s understanding of the discipline from student activist and committed Marxist to professor of economics. The book covers the breath of economic theory, written in a straightforward, engaging style. The first half of the book covers his critical assessments of Marxist economics, the disillusionment with planning and theoretical questions around the promise of autocratic growth. Hodgson lays out the arguments and takes them apart as he begins to question key theoretical reasonings and empirical realities. Most of the issues are captured by his own published work and public debates as well as personal correspondence with other prominent academicians. He was particularly disillusioned by Marxist colleagues and friends who seemed to ignore the human cost of planning as it played out in the USSR, China, and other communist states. He shows that markets are indispensable for revealing information that planners lacked. The second half of the book covers his disillusionment with Marxist theory and planning, the embrace of markets and private enterprise. Here, there is a great deal of valuable discussion about what defines free markets, the various understandings of property rights, the nature of homo economicus, and the various philosophic writings on self-interest, public spirit, and questions of inequality and equity. He is critical of market fundamentalists as well as the vacuous critiques of neoliberalism by the political left. In short, he advocates competition for generating wealth and efficiency and welfare for achieving socially desirable goals, such as freedom – as Hodgson puts it, no competition, no democracy.