Statistics and the German State, 1900 1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge. By J. Adam Tooze. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 314. $60.00.

This is a book of unusual originality and sophistication. In the burgeoning literature of history of statistics, it is one of the first and unmistakably the best to focus on the production and use of economic numbers. As history of economics, it looks away from the Keynesian high theorists who have transfixed so many commentators on interwar economic thought to the practices of administrative agencies pursuing new visions of a managed economy. Adam Tooze argues convincingly that this context of official statistics is the right one for such economists as Wassily Leontief, and important too for the rise of macroeconomics. He provides wonderful insights into the circumstances of the German economy during this traumatic era of war, inflation, depression, Nazism, and war again. And he sheds new light on the vexed question of bureaucratic infighting under a regime that dreamed of totalitarian control, one that preferred the F hrerprinzip to cumbersome state institutions. In short, he makes the history of economics and of statistics speak to central questions of the historical development of state and economy in Germany.