The U.S. publisher Open Court has released The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality, edited by Barry Smith, David M. Mark, and Isaac Ehrlich, a collection of original essays by philosophers and social scientists addressing the connections – and implications – of the work of Hernando de Soto and the philosopher John Searle, one of the 20th Century’s most influential philosophers.  “This trail-blazing collection,” Open Court declared, “brings together the distinctive themes of two provocative and influential systems of thought:  Hernando de Soto’s analysis (in his Mystery of Capital) of why market capitalism is slow to ‘take’ in many third world and post-Soviet countries, and John Searle’s exploration (in his Construction of Social Reality) of the manner in which human society is constructed by the common acceptance of certain abstract mental categories.”

The book was born out of a two-day workshop held at the University of Buffalo in 2003, which examined the philosophical, economic, and social connections between de Soto’s breakthrough approach to capitalizing the assets languishing in the underground economies of developing countries and Searle’s own major contribution to the ontology of social reality. As the editors point out in the introduction, “de Soto’s Mystery of Capital was in part influenced by Searle’s ideas on social ontology, and while a number of important connections between Searle’s and De Soto’s work can be seen, these interconnections have not hitherto been subjected to analysis.” To fill that void, the new collection seeks to explore such interconnections, and in the process address the broader question of how both philosophy and development economics can mutually reinforce one another. De Soto and Searle were featured speakers at the conference, and their presentations are included in the book – along with essays from eminent specialists writing from such diverse disciplines as ontology, information science, geography, and endogenous growth and development.

The result is book that demonstrates how vibrant and productive such interdisciplinary thought can be, representing, as Arjun Sengupta, a UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and Extreme Poverty, has noted, “a major contribution to understanding how human society functions within the framework of legal and extra-legal institutions and provides a refreshingly new approach to the problems of development.”