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Book Reviews 301
ECB (2005): The Role of Emerging Asia in the Global Economy. MonthlyBulletin (August): 7583.Eichengreen, B., and Hausmann, R. (1999): Exchange Rates and Financial Fragility. Proceedings of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, August, pp. 329
368.Kwan, C. H. (2001): Yen bloc: Toward Economic Integration in Asia. Washington,D.C.: Brookings Institution.Williamson, J. (2000): Exchange Rate Regimes for Emerging Markets: Reviving the
Intermediate Option. Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics.Cecilio Tamarit, University of Valencia, Valencia, SpainDOI 10.1007/s00712-005-0158-2Mirowski, P.: The Effortless Economy of Science? 463 pp. Duke UniversityPress, Durham London 2004. Hardcover 70.00.Philip Mirowski is a many-sided scholar, but he is best known as the author
of More Heat Than Light: an explanation of how the emergence and the form
of neoclassical theory was inuenced by the rise and the form taken of
physics in the 19th century. This research, like most of the essays in the
collection of essays by Mirowski under review, would not have been possible
without his studies of the sciences, in particular physics, and his research in
the history of science. He represents one of those scholars who advocate an
interdisciplinary approach even to the history of the individual disciplines
taught in modern universities. There are historians of science who insist on
the need for such interdisciplinarity, because late medieval and early mercantilist authors often had studied in several faculties and published in widely
different domains, with overlappings now uncommon. But Mirowski follows
his interdisciplinary approach not because old science was not as differentiated as it is today, at least from an institutional point of view, but because he
is interested in mutual cross-overs between disciplines in the recent past and,
indeed, in the present. One of his heroes is Mandelbrot who went from
economics to physics and mathematics and back again, and...