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Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
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About This Book
A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics. At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company to Apple. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new he tells the story through the eyes of the system's critics. From the Haitian rebels who overthrew French colonial capitalism and the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation, to the Latin American dependistas , the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names―Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polyani―but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Ghandian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War; and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founding father of degrowth. Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics is true big history that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.
Reviews
"The most haunting figure in this book is an outlier: Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century Scottish essayist, whose assumptions about both capitalism and humanity were so dark that he made no room for the possibility of social progress."
"Over 28 punchy, rigorous yet engagingly peopled chapters, Cassidy not only explains the economic theories of Marx, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Milton Friedman...but introduces us to a fabulous cast of lesser-known characters ..."
"A marvellously lucid overview of capitalism's critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose—if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle ..."
"Cassidy could not have predicted Donald Trump's particular brand of tariff inanity, but he comes uncannily close when he speculates that globalism may be on its last legs ..."
"It is the lesser-known figures who make this book so interesting ..."
"But Cassidy ultimately sees Marx's work as no more than a 'mixed bag.'"
"Sounds a subtle theme in his characterization of capitalism as it has developed over the past four centuries or so: It has always relied on compulsion."
"The result is a unique and invigorating view of capitalism's history."
"Yet if the individual chapters are engaging and informative, it is sometimes harder to say how they fit together."
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