Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy

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.

Genres: Economics, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Business, Audiobook, Philosophy

624 pages, Hardcover

First published May 13, 2025

About the author

John Cassidy is a journalist at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era and lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fabulous historical review of economists and their theories of capitalism in terms of their criticisms of capitalism. There are over two dozen chapters, each focusing on one or two economists, all tied to an evolving presentation of the current state of capitalism. The timeline ranges from the beginnings of capitalism a la Adam Smith and Malthus up to the present day crises and economists such as Piketty. Along the way there are lesser known scholars and commentators whose stories are even more interesting than the well known titans like Smith or Keynes.

One of the strengths of the book is the story that Mr. Cassidy tells about what is driving the state of capitalism at a particular moment. While it is common for advocates of one view of markets or another to tout the strength of their view and claim that adopting it in total would solve capitalism’s problems, Cassidy does not adopt this approach. His view of the development and morphing of capitalism is one of tensions and conflicts among opposing forces. At a basic level, there is the continuing influence of technology and its effect of displacing workers and jobs while leading towards greater productivity and performance. But there are other continuing tensions as well. One involves the spread of capital into underdeveloped and more “peripheral” markets, evoking the huge discussion of imperialism, colonialization, and globalization that continues today with its debates over free trade versus protectionism (and tariffs). A third tension is between unconstrained free market capitalism and more managed market approaches in which government sets the rules and the market in response to conflicts becomes more adapted to local conditions. This is the tension that Cassidy focuses most upon, featuring the work of Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation) and others. This is in my opinion the central tension driving the narrative. The push towards unfettered and ungoverned free market dynamics is the threat to global stability while the reactions to this push can be equally or more damaging in the directions of tariffs, autarky, and authoritarian government. Balancing conflicting currents appears to be crucial for progress (or at least the avoidance of crisis).

The above is just a start at interpretation and I could not possibly summarize this exceptional book.

[John Caleb Grenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

CAPITALISM AND ITS CRITICS
A HISTORY: FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TO AI
John Cassidy
@fsgbooks

Okay. Here goes. Here’s me telling y’all you should read a 624 page history book about capitalism by focusing on the main characters through history who most actively opposed it. Here’s me shooting my shot saying this thing is brilliant, vast and sweeping, yet profound in its plumbing, even intimate at times and, yes, accessible for those of us who don’t typically grab *sigh* 624 page history hardbacks about economics and politics that even throws a little math around here and there.

This book attracted me because it’s structured as a dynamic, sweeping narrative of history around how capitalism has changed how people interact with product and the workplace, all told by focusing on the stories and stances of people who most spoke out against the power structure keeping workers enslaved to jobs, keeping landowners and monopolies in charge of more and more massive fortunes, all in the name of growth and excess. The only place for excess to go is to go create more excess, isn’t it?

This goes into feminism, ecology, ethics, slavery, technology, election interference, monopolies of all kinds. We hear about Karl Marx, sure, and we hear about a lot of his critiques. We learn about the Nazi push against capitalism(!). I learned about Polanyi and Georgescu-Roegen. I bought more books…

What struck me as your typical non-businessy, STEM-jobbed, right brainy artsy bro, in the end, is that capitalism essentially functions like cancer. Throughout history, it’s mutated to continue to grow larger and more encompassing without bound or checkpoint stoppers, all with goals of serving its own cells (which thrive by the way). Eventually, the body it’s in though, the cells it shares a body with, can’t withstand something of infinite uncontrolled growth, though. “End stage” gets applied to things when death is imminent.

This glance into the insidious nature of how the global economy got to where it is, how much we have irreversibly done to our land, ecologies, our societies in the name of worldwide GDP growth while allowing such a small portion of our population to hoard so much of its wealth, tucked into global markets and overseas banks and networks to avoid taxation, thus undermining the initial purpose of having nation states and citizens at all—well. This book goes into all of it and I came out on the other side much more knowledgeable and feel that my further reading will be able to be more meaningful to me now.

Highly recommend this to anyone, at all.

[Jim Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s an old joke, quoted in this magisterial history of capitalism and its critics, that one can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This got me to thinking that at this present juncture in world history, it is not an exaggeration to say that it may take the end of the first to finally destroy the second.

John Cassidy, a British-born journalist for the New Yorker magazine, has delivered a timely book about the point we have arrived at, 250 years since the Industrial Revolution first began to tear apart the social fabric in his homeland. The story is told through the critics of capitalism, from the Irish social reformer William Thompson (1775-1833) to modern day critics like Dani Rodrik and Wolfgang Streeck.

Each cf the first 27 chapters is devoted to one particular thinker, with Cassidy himself putting together his own conclusions in the final chapter. What emerges throughout is both capitalism’s unerring ability to reinvent itself in the face of crisis and the growing urgency for humanity to come up with a better organising principle for our material lives and the use of the planet’s finite resources.

A more comprehensive review follows. But of all the thinkers in the book the one I think got closest to the truth and was ahead of his time was the Austro-Hungarian philosopher Karl Polanyi, whose book ‘The Great Transformation’ was released in 1944 towards the end of the Second World War - the same year as another much more influential book, ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by his fellow countryman and ideological opposite, Alfred Hayek.

Polanyi said capitalism’s only two logical end points were either socialism or fascism. And it was the hypercapitalism unleashed by Hayek’s disciples in the 80s and 90s that has now opened the way to the fascism that Polanyi predicted.

God help us all.

[Differengenera · Rating 3 out of 5]

collection of around 15 - 20 page essays offering the basics on 27 different thinkers drawn from heterodox economics, political economy, social democracy, history: Eric Williams, Luxemburg Marx Engels Kalecki Hayek Keynes Polyani etc etc. the treatment of Marx is always the barometer and he gets the usual jabs, indicating that a few of Cassidy's sources were the usual Anglo biographies which move between ambivalent, hostile or condescending.

couple of errors or simplifications re Marx Marxism which a wider reading might have prevented but these are introductory essays, those who know these figures and their work won't find much new here. to his credit it reminds me of how much I have yet to read, and he introduces a lot of contemporary historical research on things like longue-durée wages productivity, slave plantation outputs that I look forward to checking out cos a lot of the venerable works of capitalist historiography stake a lot on big claims which must be over fifty years old at this point

conclusion is a bit of a mush, a lot of in media res LLM Trump 2, deglobalisation, polycrisis, China, which is indicative of how the author doesn't put forward any theory or capitalism or its critique. last paragraphs leave things open for capitalism to reconfigure itself on stable grounds (capitalism 5 will return in Beijing), last word given to Marx and other theorists of crisis because, obviously, they're the ones who are of use now. it's fine, v readable

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew, Capitalism and Its Critics was quite the undertaking for a mid-summer read, but I'm so glad I stuck with it. John Cassidy has always been a New Yorker must-read for me; his writing is very approachable and geared towards readers without a degree in economics. This was good news for me, since I took 1 required Econ class in high school and never pursued the subject further.
Reading Capitalism and Its Critics is like taking an Econ overview with a very engaging professor. Starting in the 1700s with the East India Company and working its way to present day, Cassidy makes complicated topics easy to grasp. It's not an easy-breezy read, but anyone curious about how capitalism came to be the out of control beast it is today will get a lot out of this book. Cassidy briefly explains concepts so you get the jist without getting too in the weeds, which I appreciated.
Each chapter is focused on a different "critic" of capitalism throughout history. It was tempting to try to find a theory I agreed with the most, but it's all so much more complicated than that. Capitalism has been ruling our lives for hundreds of years and the fact that we still haven't figured out the best way to manage it is mind-boggling, but more understandable when you read the history.
I feel smarter for having read this, which is pretty much all you can ask for with this type of non-fiction book.

[Oleksandr Zholud · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a non-fiction that describes main steps in understanding what capital is and what its critics chiefly in the 19th and 20th centuries were saying. The selected critics are chiefly left-wing and therefore the book is biased this way, even if in describing main ideas of each critic it is quite fair, noting their errors as well. Each chapter has a quotation, main thinker and the context. I’ll go by chapter.

1. “The roguery practised in this department is beyond imagination” William Bolts and the East India Company William Bolts was a Dutch-born factor for the East India Company in Bengal (mid-18th century). He was shocked by the company’s corruption, monopolistic abuses, and devastating economic and human impact in India, their role in the Bengal famine. His 1772 book Considerations on India Affairs was a scathing critique of the Company’s exploitative colonial capitalism.

2. “The mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers” Adam Smith on Colonial Capitalism and Slavery Adam Smith, known as the father of modern economics, authored The Wealth of Nations (1776), where he praised free markets but sharply criticized mercantilism, including colonial monopolies like the East India Company, and the slave economy. He argued that slavery was inefficient in the long run and highlighted the global economic impacts of colonialism and the triangular trade. At the same time he was very suspicious about entrepreneurs, who often join to form cartels
3. “On the brink for the last struggle” The Logic of the Luddites The Luddites were early 19th-century English skilled textile workers who resisted mechanization that threatened their livelihoods by smashing machinery. They weren’t anti-progress or anti-technology, but they were against their traditional source of income destroyed, which has clear analogues with potential destruction of jobs by AI.
4. “It is time … to seek for a radical, a permanent cure of the evils that afflict society” William Thompson’s Utilitarian Socialism William Thompson was an Irish social reformer and early socialist (pre-Marist) thinker who combined utilitarianism and labor theory of value to argue for equality and cooperative communities. His Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness (1824) laid early foundations for socialism, gender equality, and critiqued capitalist exploitation and social injustice.
5. “In speaking of the degraded position of my sex” Anna Wheeler and the Forgotten Half of Humanity Anna Wheeler was an Irish feminist and intellectual associate of William Thompson who campaigned for women’s equality and rights in the early 19th century. She influenced Thompson’s Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women (1825), a pioneering feminist work demanding equal civil, political, and economic rights for women, sharply criticizing marriage laws and social norms.
6. “Abandon your isolation: unite with each other!” Flora Tristan and the Universal Workers’ Union Flora Tristan was a French-Peruvian early socialist and feminist who advocated for the formation of a universal workers’ union, including men and women. Her 1838 The Workers’ Union argued for class unity and women’s emancipation as essential for social revolution. Her estranged husband assaulted and shot her, but she survived.
7. “One of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth” Thomas Carlyle on Mammon and the Cash Nexus Thomas Carlyle was a British historian and social critic who depicted industrial capitalism as a soulless, mechanical system dominated by money (“Mammon”) rather than morals. His works condemned laissez-faire economics, commercial greed, and predicted social crisis and authoritarian rule as capitalism’s outcome. He was a right-wing critic of capitalism, calling for good old rustic times.
8. “The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged” Friedrich Engels and The Communist Manifesto finally, first Marxists and their views, as well as the fact that after the Communist Manifesto, in 1850, his family firm bought a second mill. As a junior partner, Engels received a generous salary plus a share of the firm’s profits. He kept two houses—one for himself and one for Lizzy—and regularly mailed cash to Marx, allocating over half his annual income to the Marx family. And none of them even mentioned that over time they exploited more and more workers!
9. “Our friend, Moneybags” Karl Marx’s Capitalist Laws of Motion on the Capital the book, its main ideas, including shifting to (even quite simplistic) formulas instead of just words.
10. “We must make land common property” Henry George’s Moral Crusade Henry George was an American political economist and reformer who thought that a true struggle was was labor vs capital, but they both vs land owners and the higher is productivity the more expensive is land. Therefore, he proposed the Single Tax on land value, arguing land rent extraction was the root cause of poverty and inequality.
11. “The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent” Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry Thorstein Veblen an American economist and sociologist most known for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), where he analyzed conspicuous consumption and waste among the wealthy. At the same time, in “Some Neglected Points in the Theory of Socialism,” (1891), he said that recent capitalist development had brought about “the most rapid advance in average wealth and industrial efficiency that the world has seen,” along with a substantial “amelioration of the lot of the less favored.” Although Veblen did acknowledge the growing attraction to socialism in some quarters, he attributed it to “envy” and “jealousy” driven by a desire for “economic emulation.”

12. “A particularly crude form of capitalism” John Hobson’s Theory of Imperialism John A. Hobson was a British economist. His Imperialism: A Study (1902), arguing imperialism was driven by surplus capital and underconsumption at home and constantly needs to capture new markets.
13. “Capital knows no other solution to the problem than violence” Rosa Luxemburg on Capitalism, Colonialism, and War Rosa Luxemburg a Polish-Jewish Marxist revolutionary thinker who critiqued capitalism’s need to expand into noncapitalist societies through imperialism (The Accumulation of Capital, 1913).
14. “The rhythm of long cycles” Nikolai Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development Nikolai Kondratiev was a Russian economist and a pupil of Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, the Ukrainian economist. He extended his tutor’s idea of “long waves” or cycles of roughly 50 years in capitalist economies driven by technological innovation and capital accumulation. Sadly, cannot be statistically proven because from the 1800s to his time just like 2.5 waves.
15. “The more troublous the times, the worse does a laissez-faire system work” John Maynard Keynes’s Blueprint for Managed Capitalism the Keynesians idea that to stop free markets from failing, government interventions are needed.
16. “The time was ripe for the fascist solution” Karl Polanyi’s Warnings About Capitalism and Democracy Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian economic historian and social theorist whose The Great Transformation (1944) argued that laissez-faire capitalism was a utopian ideal enforced by the state and that market self-regulation destroys society. “if Socialism is not to be, democracy must go. This is the raison d’être of the Fascist movements in Europe.” He wrote in 1935. “The popular resentment against Liberal Capitalism is thus turned most effectively against Socialism without any reflection on Capitalism in its non-Liberal, i.e., corporative, [fascist] forms.”
17. “The bankruptcy of reform” Two Skeptics of Keynesianism Paul Sweezy and Michał Kalecki Paul Sweezy and Michał Kalecki, Marxist economists who recognized Keynesianism’s technical validity but doubted democratic capitalism’s political capacity to sustain full employment. Capital want to have labor under control, so it can allow for crises, which hit workers more and makes them easier to control
18. “Economics once more became political economy” Joan Robinson and the “Bastard Keynesians” Joan Robinson was a Marxist British economist who challenged both neoclassical economics and orthodox Keynesianism, developing theories of imperfect competition. ‘Useful idiot’, she was convinced that state-led industrialization was the most viable way for underdeveloped countries to grow therefore she defended Stalin into the 1950s and 1960s as well as after visiting China in 1967, she wrote a sympathetic short book on the first stages of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which she described as “a popular rising.” At the same time, she is noted as the first Marxist of note, who dismissed the labor theory of value, which Marx had used extensively, saying it “fails to provide a theory of prices”
19. “Nature … faithful and submissive to those who respect her” J. C. Kumarappa and the Economics of Permanence Birth of environmental economics. He was an Indian economist and Gandhi associate who advocated decentralized, self-sufficient rural economies based on sustainable use of natural resources and cooperative village industries. His Economy of Permanence (1957) is a foundational text in ecological economics and anti-industrialism.
20. “Vast sugar factories owned by a camarilla of absentee capitalist magnates and worked by a mass of alien proletarians” Eric Williams on Slavery and Capitalism the Trinidadian historian and politician whose Capitalism and Slavery (1944) argued that profits from the slave trade and Caribbean plantations helped finance Britain’s industrial revolution.
21. “The periphery of the economic system” The Rise and Fall of Dependency Theory in Latin America Raúl Prebisch, Andre Gunder Frank, Theotônio Dos Santos, Walter Rodney, theorists who argued that Latin America’s underdevelopment was caused by its subordinate position in the global capitalist system, relying on primary exports and foreign capital. Their solution – self-sufficiency, high tariffs, subsidize industry.
22. “Shock treatment” Milton Friedman and the Rise of Neoliberalism finally, a free market advocate who popularized monetarism and deregulation. His Capitalism and Freedom (1962). Here he is shown mostly as US Republicans know him, not a word of his support of a universal guaranteed income. The author doesn’t believe that he saved GB and US from stagnation, only that his fight with trade unions and support of capital increased inequality.
23. “Any use of the natural resources for the satisfaction of non-vital needs means a smaller quantity of life in the future” Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Limits to Growth Romanian-American economist who founded ecological economics with The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), highlighting physical limits to growth via thermodynamics and resource depletion, stressing that perpetual growth is impossible.
24. “A true masterpiece at the expense of women” Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework the Italian feminist who co-founded the international Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s, arguing for recognition and payment of unpaid domestic labor essential to capitalism. Her Wages Against Housework (1975) stresses that unpaid women housework is the foundation of capitalism. What I haven’t understood from this chapter is who should pay their wages.
25. “It is a form of regressive modernisation” Theorists of Thatcherism: Stuart Hall vs. Friedrich Hayek Stuart Hall and Hayek
Achievements/Works: Hall, a cultural theorist, analyzed Thatcherism as reactionary modernization, combining cultural and economic shifts to dismantle trade unions and reshape British capitalism. Friedrich Hayek influenced Thatcher’s anti-union and pro-market policies, warning of socialism’s dangers.
26. “Social disintegration is not a spectator sport” Parsing Globalization: Samir Amin, Dani Rodrik, and Joseph Stiglitz leftist economists who critiqued globalization’s inequalities, dependency, and financial instability.
27. “A historically unprecedented situation” Thomas Piketty and Rising Inequality French economist whose Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) documented historic rises in wealth and income inequality, especially among the top 1%,
28. “A confluence that could propel a new paradigm” The End of Capitalism, or the Beginning?

[Léonie Galaxie · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Cassidy has delivered an exceptionally timely and intellectually rigorous survey that serves as both an accessible primer on economic history and a thoughtful response to contemporary concerns about capitalism's future. Drawing on his expertise as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Cassidy has crafted a comprehensive examination that will enlighten both general readers and those already familiar with economic theory.

What makes this book particularly valuable is Cassidy's broad and inclusive approach to capitalism's critics. By encompassing everyone from the Luddites and Karl Marx to dependency theorists and modern economists, he creates a rich tapestry of dissenting voices that spans centuries and continents. This comprehensive scope allows readers to understand how critiques of capitalism have evolved and adapted to changing economic conditions, providing essential context for today's debates.

Cassidy excels at identifying and analyzing watershed moments in economic history, presenting them with clarity and insight that makes complex theoretical concepts accessible to a wide audience. His ability to document these pivotal periods while maintaining analytical rigor demonstrates both his journalistic skills and his deep understanding of economic thought. The book succeeds brilliantly in helping readers understand not just what critics have said about capitalism, but why their concerns emerged when they did.

Perhaps most importantly, Cassidy's work opens up space for readers to imagine genuine alternatives to current economic arrangements. Rather than dismissing criticism or defending the status quo, he presents diverse perspectives with fairness and nuance, allowing readers to engage seriously with fundamental questions about how economies should be organized. This is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand both the historical development of capitalism and the intellectual foundations of contemporary economic debates.

[Twirlsquirrel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Main takeaway

Wide breadth but very little depth, with an overall tone that feels like reading a generic encyclopedia, or more accurately one of those entry-level survey textbooks in highschool or university. It constantly jumps between topics in the span of paragraphs, never slowing to explore the implications of one line of reasoning for any satisfying length of time before rushing to the next. Most of what you'll read are paraphrases or direct quotations of other people's work, which to be fair is how the book is introduced, but if you're hoping for insightful original commentary linking it all together in some kind of thematically satisfying or philosophically coherent fashion you'll be disappointed. Don't expect rigorous, mature, or methodologically consistent history writing from this book. Expect to feel like a kid reading a terrible textbook again.

Details

This review will center around a short and early example of how the rushed pace and survey style are inextricable from the deeply flawed analytical process of this book.

In the first section of the first chapter, we find the very first critic of capitalism mentioned by Cassidy in the main text (though Cassidy doesn't introduce him this way) - the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, quoted here describing the emergence of the industrial factory system as "probably the most important event in world history, at any rate since the invention of agriculture and cities".

This quote is from The age of revolution, which is certainly an appropriate reference for a book like Cassidy's. But here's the problem: Cassidy completely misses the point of it. We can be sure of this because he immediately responds with the following:

'Hobsbawm issued this judgment in 1962. Subsequent historical research has qualified it somewhat. Cotton-led industrialization didn't transform the rest of the British economy as rapidly as was once thought. Between 1780 and 1820, overall GDP growth remained relatively slow - less than 1.5 percent a year. If we take a longer-term view, however, Hobsbawm's basic point surely stands....'

However The age of revolution does not mention GDP a single time. It is simply never a subject of discussion, nor is it relevant to any of the points Hobsbawm makes in that book. The concept does not even make sense as a metric in the historical materialist framework Hobsbawm used to write his history.

Yet without warning, Cassidy suddenly tries to draw a line between GDP and this quoted statement, using the former to impugn the latter as some sort of pedantic gotcha. The result is a lot like hearing your friend say they think ping-pong is the funnest sport, to which you respond: "Actually ping-pong is not even in the top five most profitable sports industries worldwide, though I'm sure your basic point stands."

You just sound like a rude idiot.

If like Cassidy you have only ever been deeply exposed to a liberal conception of economics and history, you might be wondering: If GDP isn't the point of a statement like Hobsbawm's, then what is? The answer to that lies in the paragraphs immediately preceding the quoted passage from the original source material. I'll condense the relevant material here from The age of revolution:

'What does the phrase "the Industrial Revolution broke out" mean? It means that...for the first time in human history, the shackles were taken off the productive power of human societies, which henceforth became capable of the constant, rapid, and...limitless multiplication of...goods and services. ... No previous society has been able to break through the ceiling which a pre-industrial social structure...imposed on production. ... To call this process the Industrial Revolution is both logical and in line with a well-established tradition, though there was at one time a fashion among conservative historians ... to deny its existence, and substitute instead platitudinous terms like "accelerated evolution". If the sudden, qualitative and fundamental transformation ... was not a revolution then the word has no commonsense meaning. To ask when it was "complete" is senseless, for its essence was that henceforth revolutionary change became the norm. It is still going on....'

That is the relevant context for the earlier quote. The single sentence Cassidy cited was a summary rephrasing of several preceding paragraphs of sustained in-depth exploration of a complex idea regarding the Industrial Revolution - specifically, that in all of human history it is one of just a few truly fundamental discontinuities, of an explicitly qualitative kind, in the means of human material production and social organization. Yet Cassidy immediately tries to counter it with reference to a smooth quantitative measurement of economic activity. That's three profoundly mistaken conflations in a row; it is thrice-broken logic for antagonism's sake. All this, instead of simply letting the critic of capitalism speak for himself like Cassidy's introduction claimed would happen!

So yes, Hobsbawm's 'basic point' stands. It is his only point, and it stands undiminished by anything Cassidy sloppily threw at it.

This analytical fiasco illustrates exactly what's wrong with this book, and by extension all the intro-level textbooks just like it filling liberal schools.

The fundamental issue here is that there is no such thing as a neutral historical stance, but that is precisely what this book pretends to have.

Everything ever said about history or economics has come from a place of profound bias, and in order to meaningfully engage with any of it, your first task is to understand the original bias and your own, and then lay out the conflict between the two. This is what is called the dialectical process, and it's how all good history is written: By stating your ideological framework up front, opposing it to a prior interpretation, and showing your own reinterpretation of available evidence to structure a narrative that feels original and compelling.

Otherwise you end up with painfully boring lists of disembodied factoids and accompanying dates, as if such pointless collections of accumulated minutiae can help a person understand the world or its history at all.

Liberal historians and economists do not engage in the dialectical process. They have to maintain hegemony and the illusion of objectivity, so while they will certainly sling all possible muddy lies at opposing ideologies, that crucial step of articulating one's own bias is avoided at all costs. This total disavowal of such a dialectical process is exactly why liberal history textbooks always feel so excruciatingly drifting, boring, and pointless. Their feeling of aimless unreality is not a coincidence; nor is their refusal to ever mention or use the dialectical approach. That's because their whole reason for existing is to replicate the hegemonic political and economic philosophy in the trusting minds of students.

By presenting a bloodless faux-objectivity, the appalling logic and horrific consequences of capitalism can be glossed over in a sort of bizarro daydreaming trance of agony, perfect for the incoherently linked factoids floating one after another in meaningless succession across the pages of liberal textbooks everywhere. In this way the specific depravities of capitalism can be abstracted away, decoupled as motivations for specific historical events, and internalized as simply the depressing way the world works. That's just how history is, don't you know? Now cram for the test before you have time to think about any of this too deeply.

That is all tried and true methodology in public liberal schools, and it more or less tends to achieve its purpose. Which is precisely why our liberal economist Cassidy gets up to the same trick here, by pretending to give us a survey of anticapitalist ideas in the words of their authors while disrespecting and stripping away their actual context, meaning, and implications from the very start. Which is how in a book supposedly told through the lens of capitalism's critics, we have a bad-faith triple-fallacy fuckup of the very first quoted communist historian, while Adam Smith's subsequent elaboration of the brilliant efficiencies of capitalism goes on for fucking pages. (And I haven't even started on how badly Marx is butchered right from the first mention.)

This book's very broad, very shallow approach, so redolent of a disposable intro-level childhood textbook, is not an accident, but the direct result of everything mentioned above. It is the product of a liberal economist who wants to muddy the water as much as possible on anything and everything anticapitalist. With its vaguely anticapitalist title, this book is meant to hook in everyone appalled by the increasingly blatant horrors of capitalism, everyone driven to find something better in the wisdom of the anticapitalist past and present - and immediately crush those people's spirits and minds with the exact same kind of numbing public school daydream nightmare fuel that made so many people think history wasn't worth learning in the first place.

Capitalism and its critics is just a more targeted version of that, aimed at adults instead of kids, systematically misleading about one anticapitalist after another, with a parallel thread guiding the reader through ever more sophisticated and enlightened versions of capitalism, until finally we reach this conclusion from the book's very last paragraph, where it was clear to anyone with dialectical materialist training that John Cassidy was headed all along: 'The system can be reformed: the challenge is to summon the will and the means to do it.'

Which is actually the perfect note to end on, because recently I was able to see special theatrical showings of the Lord of the rings extended editions, and one thing that really stood out to me on rewatching these movies was how heartwarming and inspiring it was when the diverse coalition of policymakers, stakeholders, and informed peaceful citizens got together and reformed the magical slavery of Barad-dur, the human-orc eugenic breeding programs of Orthanc, and of course the Maiar-bound will of the One Ring for the mutual benefit of all Middle Earth.

In the immortal words of Gandalf: 'Understand that I would use this ring from a desire to do good. So I will! Thanks! Don't tell Elrond, he's a Marxist.'

What to read instead of this

The capital order by Clara Mattei

What is antiracism and why it means anticapitalism by Arun Kundnani

The Jakarta method by Vincent Bevins

The darker nations and Red star over the third world by Vijay Prashad

[Leonard Singer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top flight survey and commentary regarding the arguments of economists regarding capitalism (about which there is no universally accepted definition) and competing doctrines. Economics may be viewed as a quantitative study. But economic activity is the product of human character (good and bad) in the context of how myriad cultures address production and consumption during constantly unique periods of political and natural history. Try as they may, economists cannot identify a perfect economic system.

[Madison ✨ (mad.lyreading) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I once mentioned being anti-capitalist to my liberal aunt and she was shocked at the concept of someone not being pro-capitalist. I do not know a lot about economics, I just know the system as it is currently does not work and is actively hurting the majority of people, so I wanted to give it a read to have a bit more behind my anti-capitalist arguments than just, "It's not fair!" This book is dense, and a bit of a tough read. This is not narrative non-fiction (think Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe) and will take quite a bit of brain power to get through. However, as someone who has not taken an economics course since AP Macroeconomics in 9th grade (for which I was NOT YET READY), I was able to generally follow the critiques being conveyed to me.

Capitalism and Its Critics is a chonky book of 28 chapters, each of which follows a different theorist or theory in chronological order. While it is technically global in scope, with chapters on theorists in India and South America, it mostly focuses on Britain and the United States. You will also be treated to the delights of Reagan and Thatcher, because you can't critique capitalism without critiquing them. While I mostly read this book straight through, often with 2 or 3 chapters in one sitting, I think this book could easily be used for a college or graduate-level course, with each chapter supplemented with material by the theorists discussed. These chapters are a great introduction to the basics of these theorists/theories, and I think it would generally make the material easier to understand (I say having read almost none of these theorists myself).

One thing I appreciated about this book was that the author confronted the aspects of the theorists that go against their own theories, such as their open bigotry. It is easy to fall for the trap of idolizing someone for something great they did, but we need to remember that people generally suck and while they can do great things, they can also do great harm.

This is not a book I would recommend lightly, but if you're interested in this deep dive, I'd say take the plunge.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus, & Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

[Amanda books_ergo_sum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly what it says on the tin.

An intellectual history of capitalism and its critics. Extremely well-researched and well-cited. The tone? Patient and chill.

The ebook is like 900 pages. The audiobook is 23 hours—to paint a picture here 😅

What impressed me most about this book was:
▪️ how many critics of capitalism it contained—all the greatest hits (like Marx and Keynes), under-hyped gems (like the Luddites, Polanyi, and Joan Robinson), feminists (like Anne Wheeler and Silvia Federici), anti-imperialists (JC Kunarappa and Samir Amin), and recent critics (like Thomas Piketty).
▪️ how intro-friendly the descriptions were for critics I’d never read about before.
▪️ how accurate the descriptions were for critics I know lots about already.

So why the four stars? For me, I like my nonfiction to have a bit more of a thesis, more of an argument. Meanwhile, this book had more of a ‘show don’t tell’ quality.

But I highly recommend this book to someone who’s typically put off by the cranky, argumentative tone of Leftist economics nonfiction. If you’re craving a source that’s levelheaded, approachable, and extremely well researched, this is your book!

[Angelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would consider myself a novice when it comes to economic theory, especially beyond the big names of Marx, Engels, Keynes, etc. This can be dense at times, as someone who has never taken an economics class, but I appreciate that Cassidy lays out theories and the relevant contemporary history that shaded that theory without pushing a narrative. I felt that, with each chapter, I could engage and reread and formulate my own thoughts of each theorist’s viability in today’s hypercapitalist world. i found myself opening Wikipedia to read more about the people and concepts of this book, and that is what reading is all about to me.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kinda dry in the middle, but overall a solid contribution.

[Margaret Heller · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mini course in economic history, weaving together connections through thinkers in a page-turner kind of way that you wouldn't think this type of book would be.

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you enjoy in-depth history about economic you will love this book. Well researched and very detailed account of capitalism and competing philosophies.

[Jolanta (knygupė)]

25%

[Melle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly accessible combination of economic history and biography

[John Coupland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism: “Any market based system where the means of production were owned by private proprietors who hired managers and workers” or “widespread mobilization of capital and production for profit an environment of secure property rights”).

A good “big history” needs to find a good place to stand to observe its subject and here the author has made an excellent choice. A history of capitalism - merchant, plantation and industrial - from the perspectives of its critics. He uses this to tell the changing story of capitalist societies from the colonial exploitation of the East India Company in the eighteenth century, the industrial revolution in the nineteenth, to new-wave imperialism at the end of that century and the start of the twentieth, world wars, the global periphery, social liberalism, Keynes, neo-liberalism and environmentalism. I loved it. It was accessible and hit in that sweet spot where I’m interested but ignorant.
Some of the main characters discussed at more length than is useful in a review but as these are my only notes on the book it might help me to remember them. (quotes in parentheses from the writer discussed).

• William Bolts (1738-1808)– against the corruption of the East India Company. Using political and military hegemony to gain commercial advantage

• Adam Smith (1723-1790) – pro-free markets but against colonial capitalism, monopolies, and mercantilism. Invisible hand if market is working well. Division of labor. (‘One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”)

• Ned Ludd (1810s) – breaking machines and the conservation of the old economic order

• William Thompson (1775-1833) and Anna Wheeler (1780-1848) – early nineteenth century, cooperatives and utilitarianism, women’s rights: Bentham and James Mill, Fourier’s Phalanx, Robert Owens in New Lanark and New Harmony.

• Flora Tristan (1803-1844)– a universal union of working men and women in France

• Thomas Carlisle (1795-1881)- The capitalist system has reduced human interactions to cash transactions and laissez faire. Economic progress and democracy can’t save us; we need an enlightened aristocracy

• Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895)– economic critique of the early factory capitalism in England. Bourgeoise vs. Proletariat and the coming revolution. Engels writing in the 1840s saw (in the Communist Party Manifesto) things differently than Marx did in the 50s and 60s (Capital). The immiseration thesis: “all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage to a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil;”

• Henry George (1839-1997)– An American perspective. The importance of land, landlords and rent

• Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)– Gilded Age, monopolies, conspicuous consumption. Capitalists involved in production (good) vs. parasitic capitalists (advertising, finance).

• John Hobson (1858-1940) – critique of early twentieth century colonialism as a hijacking of democratic processes and military might to build markets for wealthy industrialists and financiers in circumstances when poverty in the home markets limits the purchase of industrial goods.

• Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) – Updating Marx to account for current trends in capitalism and especially colonialism (capitalism must expand), Lenin, real revolutions with guns. Fascinating how they were involved in academic research while doing practical revolutionary politics. Marxists seem very committed to building some great theory to explain how the world is behaving as it is evolving.

• Nikolai Kondratiev (1892-1938) – long cycles in capitalism and the challenges of doing academic research in a totalitarian state. Struck again by how invested many in the Soviet leadership were in the details of economic theory/dogma.

• John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) – sitting in Cambridge (and Versailles and Breton Woods) trying to save capitalism (and liberty) with monetary policy and government spending. Sets up the best thirty years in the history of global capitalism.

• Karl Polani (1886-1964) – escaping Fascist Europe and pondering on the relationships between capitalism and democracy. Just because they arose at the same time does not mean they are bound together – fascism offers capitalism a horrific alternative.

• Paul Sweezy (1910-2004) and Michal Kalecki (1899-1970) - Keynesianism is vulnerable to political traps where capitalists resist full employment to retain control of workers.

• Joan Robinson (1903-1983) – Bastard Keynesians have treated the economy like a computer program. Political, historic and social factors right. We still have a lot to learn from Marx. (Also worked with Amartya Sen). (“Capitalist industry is dazzlingly efficient at producing goods to be sold in the shops, and, directly or indirectly, profits are derived from selling. The services to meet basic human needs do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially as, with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have to be offered irrespective of means to pay. Consequently they must be largely provided through taxation. To supply goods is a source of profit, but to supply services is a ‘burden upon industry’. It is for this reason that when, as a nation, ‘we have never had it so good’ we find that we ‘cannot afford’ just what we most need.”)

• J.C. Kumarappa (1892-1960) – Ghandian economics in India. Trying to preserve a village-based economy avoiding the social degradation of mass production. Interesting as a potential influence of Vandana Siva. (“Regimentation certainly has its place and function where the objective is not the development of personality but some joint effort-as in an army or a factory-where each head or hand counts rather than the individual, who has to be submerged in such cases in the general interest of the goal, which is the all absorbing and supreme consideration and the individual is only the means of attaining it. To us, the development of the individual being the objective, and the organization only the means of securing it, there can be no place for regimentation in our scheme.”)

• Eric Williams (1911-1981) – Capitalism and Slavery. Looking at the European Industrial Revolution in the context of the slave plantation economies of the Caribbean.

• Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Andre Frank – core-periphery dynamic, where wealthier nations (the core) exploit poorer nations (the periphery), leading to persistent underdevelopment. The historic contexts of capitalism in Latin America and proposing ways to achieve economic progress there. A really good section on the economic history of Argentina.

• Milton Friedman (1912-2006) – Against Keynes. The economy has a “natural” equilibrium that can be reached by minimizing government interventions. High unemployment helps control labor demands and inflation. Author is cutting about the value of Friedman’s thoughts as an economist.

• Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994) - Against growth. Economic activity converts low entropy natural resources into high entropy (!) consumer products and pollution. This was the first one that really brought home a question as to what the project of political economy is all about. While agreeing with the concern that natural resources are important and that infinite economic expansion is impossible it seems the people who really got behind this theory never really grappled with the consequences of zero growth or when these constraints would become important. What we got was less a solid economic model and more the use of economic language to reinforce a political preference. Perhaps that’s what political economy is all about?

• Silvia Federici (1942-) – Wages for housework. The capitalist system has chosen to ignore women’s historic contribution to the economy simply because it’s hard to measure. You can’t build Fords unless we raise babies. Often at odds with second wave feminists who felt that work outside the home was an essential part of women’s liberation.

• Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) – Socialism requires planning and planning means state control which puts us on a road to somewhere or other. A key inspiration (along with Friedman) for Thatcherism and particularly he efforts to break trade union power and roll back regulation. The transition from post-war social democracy (Keynes) to neo-liberalism.

• Stuart Hall (1932-2014) – Reading Gramsci to argue that capitalism has a cultural component and that Thatcher’s revolution captured various non-economic elements important to segments of the British working class to gain support for her programs (anti-immigrant, law and order, popular home and stock ownership). He would be a good person to read to understand the current American administration. (“Neither Keynesianism nor Monetarism win votes in the electoral marketplace. But in the doctrines and discourses of "social market values"—the restoration of competition and personal responsibility for effort and reward, the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state—"Thatcherism" has found a powerful means of popularizing the principles of a Monetarist philosophy: and in the image of the welfare "scavenger" a well designed folk-devil.”)

• Amin, Rodrik, Stiglitz - The 90s saw increased globalization of the economy with the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and, more importantly, the rise of China as well as India and other post-colonial Asian countries. Globalization was made possible by two technological developments - the containerization of shipping and electronic communications (internet)- which set off another one of Kondratiev’s “long waves”. Its effects were explained in terms of the correctness of Friedman/Hayek’s theories. (That’s another trouble with political economy – its claims aren’t truths that can be verified by repeated experiments). The effects included a disciplining of workers in previously poor countries got richer and challenged Western hegemony (while remaining committed to the global capitalist system). Western countries as the threat of automation and offshoring reduced labor demands while at the same time driving down the cost of goods in those countries. At the same time globalization reduced the capacity of states to tax capital as it became easier to move to low-tax countries (Ireland, Singapore). Taken together these two factors make globalized capitalism unpopular in western democracies and lead to increased demands for trade restrictions. This brings nicely us to our current crisis.

• Thomas Piketty (1971-) – inequality is growing and becoming unsustainable in a democracy. The period 1914-1980 was an exception and now neoliberalism and globalization has helped the very rich by giving them levers to control democracy and hence tax policy, enforcement of property rights, and regulation of financial markets. It has not benefited either the poorest in the world or the poor in rich countries. Oligarchy of the 0.1%. (Marx and Engels: “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”) This brings us nicely to our current crisis.

And what comes next? Capitalism has been with us for 250 years, lurching from crisis to crisis yet never quite collapsing. (The idea of sudden collapse should terrify all of us. We eat because truck drivers, and factory workers, and farmers we will never meet trust the system enough to show up for work every morning. If they stopped, we would be in anarchy in a week and we might not come back). Today’s challenges include the losers from globalization, the cooption of political power by oligarchs, and new general purpose technologies that might (or might not) be as transformative as the steam engine, the shipping container, or the internet. And climate change. These are all new problems, but at the same time not new. Many of the critics of capitalism across its history have worried about related issues and this book provides a useful collection of their ideas.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I closed ‘‘Capitalism and Its Critics: A History’’ this morning with that rare, almost physical sensation that accompanies an exceptional work of popular economics: the feeling not of having ‘finished’ a book, but of having been quietly, methodically re-educated.

John Cassidy has not merely written a survey of economic thought; he has composed a moral, intellectual, and historical cartography of capitalism—one that maps not its triumphs, but its discontents, its fractures, its unfinished arguments.

And in doing so, he has produced what may well be the most lucid, humane, and intellectually honest account of capitalism’s long, contested life that I have read in years.

The following chapters make this book up:

1. “The roguery practised in this department is beyond imagination”:
William Bolts and the East India Company

2. “The mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers”:
Adam Smith on Colonial Capitalism and Slavery

3. “On the brink for the last struggle”:
The Logic of the Luddites

4. “It is time … to seek for a radical, a permanent cure of the evils that afflict society”:
William Thompson’s Utilitarian Socialism

5. “In speaking of the degraded position of my sex”:
Anna Wheeler and the Forgotten Half of Humanity

6. “Abandon your isolation: unite with each other!”:
Flora Tristan and the Universal Workers’ Union 82

7. “One of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth”:
Thomas Carlyle on Mammon and the Cash Nexus

8. “The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged”:
Friedrich Engels and The Communist Manifesto

9. “Our friend, Moneybags”:
Karl Marx’s Capitalist Laws of Motion

10. “We must make land common property”:
Henry George’s Moral Crusade

11. “The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent”:
Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry

12. “A particularly crude form of capitalism”:
John Hobson’s Theory of Imperialism

13. “Capital knows no other solution to the problem than violence”:
Rosa Luxemburg on Capitalism, Colonialism, and War

14. “The rhythm of long cycles”:
Nikolai Kondratiev and the Dynamics of Capitalist Development

15. “The more troublous the times, the worse does a laissez-faire system work”:
John Maynard Keynes’s Blueprint for Managed Capitalism

16. “The time was ripe for the fascist solution”:
Karl Polanyi’s Warnings About Capitalism and Democracy

17. “The bankruptcy of reform”:
Two Skeptics of Keynesianism: Paul Sweezy and Michał Kalecki

18. “Economics once more became political economy”:
Joan Robinson and the “Bastard Keynesians”

19. “Nature … faithful and submissive to those who respect her”:
J. C. Kumarappa and the Economics of Permanence

20. “Vast sugar factories owned by a camarilla of absentee capitalist magnates and worked by a mass of alien proletarians”:
Eric Williams on Slavery and Capitalism

21. “The periphery of the economic system”:
The Rise and Fall of Dependency Theory in Latin America

22. “Shock treatment”:
Milton Friedman and the Rise of Neoliberalism

23. “Any use of the natural resources for the satisfaction of non-vital needs means a smaller quantity of life in the future”:
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Limits to Growth

24. “A true masterpiece at the expense of women”:
Silvia Federici and Wages for Housework

25. “It is a form of regressive modernisation”:
Theorists of Thatcherism: Stuart Hall vs. Friedrich Hayek

26. “Social disintegration is not a spectator sport”:
Parsing Globalization: Samir Amin, Dani Rodrik, and Joseph Stiglitz

27. “A historically unprecedented situation”:
Thomas Piketty and Rising Inequality

28. “A confluence that could propel a new paradigm”:
The End of Capitalism, or the Beginning?

Popular economics often suffers from two fatal temptations. One is evangelism: the book as sermon, in which markets are either deified or demonised. The other is simplification: history flattened into slogans, thinkers reduced to caricatures, complexity sacrificed for accessibility. Cassidy avoids both traps with quiet confidence.

His prose is supple without being showy, learned without being intimidating, morally alert without tipping into polemic. This is a work written by someone who understands that capitalism is not a doctrine but a ‘process’—messy, global, adaptive, and perpetually under dispute.

What struck me first, even before the arguments cohered, was the book’s tone. Cassidy does not write like a prosecutor assembling a case, nor like a cheerleader defending a system. He writes like a historian of ideas who respects disagreement as the engine of intellectual progress.

The subtitle—’A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI’—could easily have promised a breathless sprint across centuries. Instead, what we get is something more patient and more radical: capitalism seen through the eyes of those who doubted it, resisted it, refined it, or tried to replace it.

This shift in perspective is not merely stylistic. It changes the moral geometry of the story. Capitalism, in Cassidy’s telling, does not advance through heroic entrepreneurs alone, but through confrontation—between factory owners and Luddites, colonisers and rebels, planners and markets, growth enthusiasts and ecological pessimists. The system evolves not because it is infallible, but because it is constantly forced to respond to its critics.

The opening chapters, anchored around the East India Company, set the template. Cassidy reminds us—without rhetorical flourish—that global capitalism did not begin with steam engines and Manchester mills, but with monopolies, charters, violence, and oceans crossed under flags of convenience.

The East India Company appears here not as a footnote to the Boston Tea Party, but as a multinational behemoth avant la lettre, blending commerce, state power, and coercion with breathtaking efficiency. From the very start, capitalism is inseparable from empire.

This global framing is one of the book’s great strengths. Cassidy refuses the comforting myth that capitalism was a purely European or Atlantic phenomenon whose darker consequences were unfortunate side effects. Instead, he places slavery, colonial extraction, and forced labour at the system’s foundation.

His discussion of the triangular trade is measured but devastating, and his engagement with Eric Williams’s ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ is among the most balanced I have encountered. Cassidy neither sanctifies Williams nor dismisses him; he situates the thesis within its intellectual battles and allows the reader to see why it continues to provoke discomfort.

What I appreciated deeply was Cassidy’s ability to give intellectual dignity to figures who are often reduced to slogans. Adam Smith, for instance, emerges not as the crude prophet of laissez-faire so often invoked in political debates, but as a morally anxious thinker deeply concerned with sympathy, justice, and the corrosive effects of unchecked power.

Marx, too, is treated with seriousness rather than ritual reverence or ritual scorn. Cassidy understands Marx not as a failed prophet, but as a diagnostician whose questions continue to haunt capitalism even when his answers no longer persuade.

Yet the real joy of this book lies in its recovery of ‘less familiar voices’. William Thompson, Flora Tristan, J. A. Hobson, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen—these are not names that populate undergraduate syllabi or airport bookshops.

Cassidy rescues them from obscurity not out of antiquarian interest, but because they illuminate blind spots in mainstream economic thought.

Take Flora Tristan, for instance. In Cassidy’s hands, she is not merely a historical curiosity, but a reminder that labour movements were once inseparable from feminist visions of social transformation. Or Joan Robinson, whose critique of Cold War economics reveals how ideology can masquerade as technical expertise.

These chapters feel less like digressions and more like necessary corrections—counter-traditions that history sidelined at its own peril.

As an Indian reader, I found the chapter on J. C. Kumarappa particularly resonant. Too often, Gandhian economics is dismissed as quaint or impractical, its ecological insights treated as moral exhortations rather than serious economic thought.

Cassidy does not fall into this trap. He situates Kumarappa within a global conversation about scale, sustainability, and the moral limits of growth—making it clear that ideas now reborn under the banner of “degrowth” have deeper, non-Western genealogies.

Cassidy’s handling of dependency theory and figures like Samir Amin further reinforces the book’s refusal to treat capitalism as a closed system. The core-periphery dynamic is not presented as a dogma, but as a lens—one that explains persistent global inequalities without collapsing into determinism.

What emerges is a picture of capitalism as structurally uneven, capable of generating astonishing wealth and astonishing deprivation simultaneously.

The later chapters, moving into the twentieth century and beyond, are where Cassidy’s relevance becomes impossible to ignore. Keynes appears not as a technocratic saviour, but as a pragmatic critic trying to humanise capitalism from within.

Polanyi’s warning about the “disembedding” of markets feels eerily contemporary, especially in an age where social relations are increasingly mediated by platforms and algorithms.

And then comes the present—or rather, the uneasy threshold between present and future. Cassidy’s discussion of artificial intelligence, climate change, and ecological limits is admirably restrained.

He does not indulge in apocalyptic prophecy, nor does he retreat into technocratic optimism. Instead, he frames AI as the latest chapter in a long history of automation anxiety, reminding us that the Luddites were not enemies of progress but critics of its distribution.

This historical continuity is one of the book’s quiet achievements. Cassidy shows that every technological leap produces its own moral questions, and that dismissing critics as reactionaries is itself a historical pattern—one that has often aged badly. The debates around AI, like those around mechanisation or globalisation, are not about technology per se, but about power, ownership, and dignity.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of ‘Capitalism and Its Critics’ is its refusal to offer closure. There is no grand synthesis at the end, no manifesto disguised as conclusion. Cassidy understands that capitalism’s story is unfinished precisely because its critics have never stopped asking uncomfortable questions.

Growth versus sustainability. Efficiency versus equity. Innovation versus security. These are not problems to be solved once and for all; they are tensions to be managed, renegotiated, and revisited by each generation.

Reading this book in 2026, amid anxieties about climate collapse, algorithmic surveillance, and obscene inequality, I was struck by how much intellectual humility it models. Cassidy does not pretend that past critics had all the answers.

Many were wrong. Some were tragically so. But he insists—rightly—that their questions mattered, and that ignoring them is a luxury we can no longer afford.

There is also, beneath the scholarship, a quiet ethical insistence running through the book: that economics is not a value-neutral science. It is a way of organising human life. And any system that shapes how people work, eat, migrate, and die must be open to moral scrutiny.

By the time I reached the final pages, I realised that what Cassidy has written is not merely a history of capitalism’s critics, but a defence of ‘criticism itself’. In an age that increasingly equates critique with negativity, obstruction, or disloyalty, this is a bracing reminder that progress—such as it is—has always been born of dissent.

Popular economics does not, indeed, get better than this. Not because Cassidy flatters the reader or simplifies the past, but because he trusts us—with complexity, with ambiguity, with unresolved arguments. This is a book that rewards slow reading, reflection, and rereading. A book that leaves you better equipped not with answers, but with sharper questions.

I finished it this morning feeling intellectually enlarged and morally unsettled—in the best possible way.

And that, for a book about capitalism, may be the highest praise of all.

Go for it. It will help you understand history, vis a vis the current global order.

Happy reading.

[Paul Sand · Rating 3 out of 5]

This fat tome was on the New Non-Fiction table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I could tell it would be out of my ideological comfort zone, but I promised myself that I'd venture there every so often. It's very long, 518 pages of main text. And it turned out to be packed with dull-but-earnest prose with plenty of details in which I can't imagine anyone would be interested. [Page 240, picked at random, about the early USSR: "NKFin [the People's Commissariat of Finance] was headed by Grigory Sokolnikov, a veteran Bolshevik who had been an early associate of Nikolai Bukharin, a Marxist theorist who was a prominent party figure." If you made it to the end of that sentence without wishing you were doing something else, good for you.]

But I worked my way through it, admittedly in "looked at every page" mode at some points.

To be fair, the author, John Cassidy, demonstrates a wide range of meticulous research into economic and social history, spanning centuries, across the globe. Although his sympathies are clearly with capitalism's critics, his basic theme can't help but admit that various flavors of "capitalism" have been the dominant force pulling billions of people out of poverty in a historical eye-blink. (He doesn't do a lot of graphs, but he provides a "hockey stick" one early on that's simple but revealing.

The book cover lists many of the "critics" he discusses: William Bolts, the Luddites, Adam Smith, William Thompson, Anna Wheeler, Flora Tristan, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Henry George, John Hobson, Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Kondratiev, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, J.C. Kumarappa, Eric Williams, Raul Frebisch, Milton Friedman, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Silvia Frederici, Stuart Hall, Samir Amin, and Thomas Piketty.

You may have not heard of all those people.

So, you'll note: Cassidy discusses a few capitalist champions (Adam Smith and Milton Friedman) not just critics. (Hayek gets some discussion as well, mostly as an inspiration to Maggie Thatcher.)

That's not to say that Cassidy is even-handed. He refers (p. 392) to the "cult of [Milton] Friedman", and it's hard to avoid detecting a note of disparagement there. I didn't notice (for example) any reference to the "cult of Marx", and I think that's probably more apt.

Some of the "critics" launched movements that sputtered out pretty quickly. Chapter 24 is titled "Silvia Frederici and Wages for Housework". A movement "demanding payment from the government for domestic labor." Presumably this wouldn't involve periodic surprise inspections to ensure that dishes were being washed promptly, laundry carefully dried and folded, and mantels being diligently dusted.

Later in that chapter, "Italian leftist" Mariarosa Della Costa is quoted: "In the same way as women are robbed of the possibility of developing their creative capacity, they are robbed of their sexual life which has been transformed into a function for reproducing labour power. […] Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labour power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment."

It was the 70s, man.

I tend to be attuned to University of New Hampshire connections when reading. I found three: (1) Marxist Paul Sweezy gets an extended discussion, but not his SCOTUS case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, which turned on his refusal to answer the NH Attorney General's questions about a lecture he gave at UNH in 1954. (2) UNH Econ prof Dennis Meadows gets some ink as one of the contributors to the predictions of ecological doom in the book The Limits to Growth. And (3) "wages-for-housework" activist Margaret Prescod gets a brief mention; for some reason I knew that she is the mother of UNH Physics prof Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

So, even though there's lots of capitalism-criticism here, what shines through is a mutation of that old oft-mangled Churchill quote: capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.

[Isaac Chan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was big but extremely readable (it runs to 600+ pages in original copies I believe, whereas my compressed-print pirated copy ran to only 400+ pages). I thought it was pretty well-researched for a book by a journalist. Ultimately, it was less about critiques of capitalism by economists, but more social, political and cultural critiques. I was fine with that because the author, John Cassidy, had nicely included the names of the anti-capitalistic intellectuals that he writes about in the cover of the book, so I could take a look at them and recognize few mainstream economists. In other words, I already knew where this book was going before I started reading it.

But towards the end of the book, I had an epiphany about what made this book so enjoyable and thought-provoking – I realized that I had learned much of what I may call ‘real’ economics. The chapters on Marx and Engels were particularly insightful.

It had taken me until the end of my econ degree to finally come to terms with the reality that, although an econ degree at a top university might make a student superbly proficient at solving systems of multivariate equations or maximizing Lagrangians (i.e. what Coase called ‘blackboard economics’), I had come out of the process knowing severely little more about the real world, save for the CORE Econ class and an economic history class. I had long forgotten that economics is, ultimately, a human science, and statistical aggregates like, say, the non-farm payrolls or the median household income are not merely interesting numbers to look at on a screen, but represent real, lived experiences and actual livelihoods. The tacit assumption by the econ depts of the world, that if you’re intelligent enough to write code, use MatLab, and solve otiose equations (i.e. blackboard economics), then you will definitely be smart enough to figure out real-world economics on your own, did not seem to have held up in my experience at least, and definitely those of many of my peers. I also did not know why I was studying eigenfunctions and eigenvalues for macro, when the Fed just looks at PCE, the jobs report, the Uni of Michigan consumer sentiment survey etc and calls it a day.

Thus, Cassidy’s ‘Capitalism and its critics’ reminded me of what all this was supposed to be about – to learn how the real world works and how real people live their lives. Cassidy covers 20+ left-wing intellectuals, with great balance and neutrality, who each packed a serious punch to their respective distinct critiques of capitalism. And what made this book work was that, instead of inserting his own voice (which I could not be less interested in, given that Cassidy is no Keynes), Cassidy made the point of adding colour to the voices and arguments of the 20+ intellectuals. Also, like from all good books, I discovered a host of new books and people that I want to read about, from Cassidy’s coverage. I’m fairly sure that most ardent free-marketeers would be persuaded to change their mind somewhat on certain fundamental economic issues after reading this book.

I could not help but notice a clear pattern – that communitarians and socialists have historically lacked a clear economic plan for their grand ideals. This pattern stretches all the way to the earliest communitarian that Cassidy covers, William Thompson – who I learned provided an early socialist argument of utilitarianism based on redistributing income to those with high marginal utility, that anticipated Bentham and Mill. Many of these radicals have indeed tried to put their ideas for ‘communities’ into reality, but failed largely due to the impracticality of these ideals and the sheer disregard for the reality of human nature. Should we continue to relegate to coincidence that so many of these communitarian projects have failed, or continue to place the blame on the evil capitalists who suppress these egalitarian efforts to keep the system going? I don’t think so. Ironically, it was Cassidy who directed my attention to this pattern of failure.

I can never understand why socialists and de-growthers think that, if we regress technical progress back by centuries, to live in egalitarian self-sufficient communities where people make handicrafts, that will vanquish the fundamental human drive to profit and accumulate. In communities like these, what will happen to those who are naturally more talented than others? Do the communitarians even plan to reward natural talent? Do they genuinely think that humans will stop responding to incentives once placed in a makeshift environment called a 'community'? Huh? I'm genuinely trying to understand their perspective.

For a story of capitalism that is intentionally told through the eyes of its critics, I was very satisfied with the characters I met in Cassidy’s book, particularly the ones I have long considered my heroes. Smith is not portrayed as the patron saint of free markets as he is by the right, but as a fierce critic of monopoly and slavery (which, admittedly, I was less interested in). If mercantilism is (arguably, rightfully) seen as a legitimate form of capitalism before the Smithian revolution, then, Smith is perhaps not just capitalism’s greatest philosopher but also its greatest critic. Keynes, similarly, was freed of the caricature of technocratic demand-management, and we got instead Keynes the great mind who strove to save capitalism from those who wanted to abolish it (i.e. Marx). I was also happy and nostalgic to see 1 of my old professors, Wendy Carlin, who uncoincidentally created and taught the course that I thought was genuinely useful for understanding 'lived economics', CORE Econ, featured near the end of the book, of course not as a protagonist who commanded a chapter of her own, but as a leading voice in contemporary expert analyses of capitalism.

Reading this book wasn’t always straightforward because it pulled my beliefs in various different directions. If anything it persuaded me that there exists a whole range of plausible arrangements between outright communism and hyper-capitalism, but I would want to impose a new axis into the political-economic compass – PRAGMATISM. For example, out of the critics covered in this book, in my view only Keynes (and arguably even Piketty! Due to his strong formulaic descriptions of the laws of capital, and similarly systematic proposals for tax reform) seemed to have produced a system of robust economic proposals to back up his critique of laissez-faire, which proved his theories right by actually working until the great inflation of the 70s, and arguably working again in the wake of the GFC and in the economic rescue for Covid. The success of Keynes rested greatly on his actual knowledge of economics and practical market experience – many of the intellectuals covered here by Cassidy, for example, Flora Tristan, Silvia Federici, and Anna Wheeler, have none of that.

I say – one must know the rules before one is able to break them.

[S Ashok · Rating 4 out of 5]

Capitalism the economic system that we take for granted in the twentieth century evolved over a period of two centuries. Philosophers, economists, have been baffled by this system, they have tried to understand it and their criticisms have helped it evolve it to what we see it today. In the early years of capitalism when it evolved in the United Kingdom, it was very different to what we see today. In the early years the companies such as the British East India company were involved in exploitation of colonies and were themselves not creating much value more than buying goods from the colonies they controlled in the colonies and selling them in their home country. This phase is called as mercantile capitalism, this was a precursor to the industrial capitalism that evolved in the 18th century. Even as industrial capitalism began in the 18th century, the working conditions were draconian, workers were paid so little, children and women worked for more than 14 hours, the capitalists controlled the government, and common working class people had no rights. Hence as you see much has changed over the years, capitalism has shape shifted so much over the years. It has adapted , made changes and evolved as it faced challenges. In this book, each chapter covers the various critiques of capitalism over its existence in the last two centuries. The book is deeply researched and each chapter shows the historical evolution.
To broadly categorize the criticisms,

1. Economic criticisms :
Right from the earlier times scholars have wondered about the economic difference of capitalism compared to the feudal world it replaces. It is characterized by profit motive, it seems to be extremely unstable. These aspects have been criticised by various scholars from Thompson, Marx and Engels, Keynes etc. Capitalism tendency to profit maximisation results in its exploitative tendencies, one way it creates its profits is by undercutting wages and keeping the working class in poverty. This creates a dilemma if the working class are going to be in a state of pverty who buys the things the capitalists are producing. In the earlier years this has resulted in capitalistic countries searching for new markets and trying to sell to markets outside of capitalistic production. This has created cycles of boom and bust where economic growth is characterized by depression resulting in loss of work and employment. This has been characterized as the major contradiction of capitalism by Marx and Engles which as per them will eventually resulting in the overthrow of the system itself by a workers revolution. Others in the Marxian tradition like Roxa Luxembourg have tried to understand how imperialism as an inevitable part of capitalism. Roxa Luxembourg argues that a capitalistic system will always need colonial markets to sell its surplus. Economists like Keynes also have identified this instability of Laissez faire capitalism, and he argues that monetary policies, government spending can boost demand there by maintaining a healthy economy. Post Keynesian marxists have questioned whether the state which is to a large extent controlled by capitalists can go against their class interest by spending heavily and boosting demand by raising taxes against the rich.

Social Criticisms
Capitalism also drastically changes the social dynamics compared to the earlier economic systems. It reduces the individual to a state of isolation where they are dislocated from their homes and forced to live in large cities where traditional systems of support are non-existent. The earlier socialstic critiques have shown how this creates lot of issues at the socieatal level. They call for the unity of labour, especially women who are forced to work in factories face the added challenge of managing the families and also to work for lower wages. The pathetic conditions of working in the earlier states of industrial capitalism resulted in diseases and ailments wgainst which the working class was powerless. These early socialists called for the unity among the working class, they also wish to setup a socialist society not based on violence but one where people voluntarily cooperate to produce what is needed and take care of each other. This utopian dream never came to be adapted in large numbers but these idealistic socislists endeavours brough in much needed changes in the conditions of the working class especially women.

Moral Criticism
There are also scholars whoc questioned the morality of the system itself, its elevation of materialism and profit motive, its rampant over consumption, the destruction of nature, its need for endless growth etc. Important among them are JC Kumarappa and other proponents of degrowth economics who wished to prirotise human welfare over ever increasing needs. They questioned the systems ever increasing need of resources such as fossil fuels, they also questioned how the individual person is alienated in this system of work where they dont seem to gain any spiritual value out of labour. They also questioned how the seemingly permanent growth is based on transient resources and does not seem to add anything to human happiness.

Historical Criticism
In addition to it there are also criticisms raised from colonial countries which suffered immensely during the early stages of industrial capitalism. Eric Williams argues that how the early years of capitalism were seed funded by slavery. How colonial exploitation was fundamental to the rise of capitalism in the west. In a simillar way Silvia Federici have argued how women work in the family is central to capitalism growth as home provides for the labour of men.

This book is a masterful achievement.

[Phen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is essentially an ensemble of quotes from various notable economic writers thrown together with some extra commentary by John. It’s a solid and interesting lineup of writers he picks for discussion, but very little meaningful commentary from him other than some historical context around the quotes.

From the get-go he proves to be a somewhat unreliable narrator, ending his section on Adam Smith by saying “if mercantilism was a form of capitalism - and it surely was - smith was a noted critic of capitalism as well as its greatest philosopher.” Dubious as best 🙄, so maybe constraining the book to quoting infamous writers is a blessing after all.

[Lily Evangeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Money, social prestige, the bureaucracy, and the armed forces of the state, the channels of public communication—all these are controlled by capital, and they are being and will continue to be used to the utmost to maintain the position of capital.” Given this stranglehold, there was little prospect of lasting changes in policy. Should any serious threat emerge, the capitalists would buy off reformist leaders, and media propaganda would keep the masses in check. “The outcome is not the reform of capitalism, but the bankruptcy of reform,” Sweezy concluded. “This is neither an accident nor a sign of the immorality of human nature; it is a law of capitalist politics." "

“But Robinson insisted there was another issue to be considered, an even deeper one: “Whether capitalism, even when prosperous, can provide us with what we really want.”61 To live a fulfilling life, she pointed out, people needed decent housing, reliable healthcare, and a good education, but “growing wealth always leaves us with a greater deficiency in just those things.” This was no accident, she insisted: it came down to economics and profits. “Capitalist industry is dazzlingly efficient at producing goods to be sold in the shops, and, directly or indirectly, profits are derived from selling,” she wrote in her New Left Review piece. “The services to meet basic human needs do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially as, with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have to be offered irrespective of means to pay. Consequently, they must be largely provided through taxation.” Given the opposition of businesses and wealthy people to paying higher taxes, this created a serious problem. “To supply goods is a source of profit, but to supply services is a ‘burden upon industry.’ It is for this reason that when, as a nation, ‘we have never had it so good,’ we find that we ‘cannot afford’ just what we most need.” ”

I knew next to nothing about economics, the history of economics, or capitalism going in, so at lot of this (especially the names) just went in one ear & out the other. However, I got what I was looking for--which was a structure which with to understand how we got to where we are now, and (hopefully) the ability to have a more nuance perspective than simply "capitalism is the worst."

He takes us up to the present day in terms of critics, but doesn't off (really) any sort of solution of his own. Which, actually, I think is fine. The book speaks for itself--as does the disaster we find ourselves in today. It's an important reminder that our current economic system & world was by no means inevitable--people made choices in the context of their times, and here we are. Capitalism as we know it was by no means our destiny. And our future, bleak as it seems sometimes, is also not inevitable--it will come about because of our choices.

Also, y'all. The East India Company? That's some craziness right there. Wow.

I listened to the audiobook (of course), so that made the reading much less burdensome--it felt more like an extremely long podcast. And despite being quite heavy on the facts & covering so many topics, I found it to actually be quite engagingly written & accessible despite my inexperience.

Overall, excellent choice, Lily. I still don't know too much, but I've got so much more context. Recommended for all!

[Jared Quigg · Rating 4 out of 5]

"After he had laid out the huge income gaps that characterized Victorian England, Marx quoted the liberal politician William Gladstone, who had recently remarked: 'While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor.' 'How lame an anti-climax!' Marx continued. 'If the working class has remained 'poor,' only 'less poor' in proportion as it produces for the wealthy class an 'intoxicating augmentation of wealth and power' then it has remained relatively just as poor. If the extremes of poverty have not lessened, they have increased because the extremes of wealth have.' In other words, relative immiseration has increased."
--John Cassidy, "Capitalism and Its Critics"

The colder months are for big books, and I had been wanting to read this one for some time. It's good news for the movement that opposition to capitalism is growing so strong that liberals like John Cassidy cannot help but write about anti-capitalist figures.

The problem with Cassidy's book is that the sympathy he has for such figures largely consists of roads not taken. He chides the Bolsheviks as authoritarian, instead reserving praise for a Socialist Revolutionary; Lenin mostly takes a backseat to Rosa Luxemburg; the Georgists would seem much more prescient than the Marxists -- the list goes on. Cassidy, like many liberals, only has praise for the revolutions that failed, and would rather shun the ones that actually captured power.

But, aside from this, "Capitalism and Its Critics" is a book that I enjoyed reading, a book I learned from, and a book that I'd recommend to others. Some of my favorite chapters were about the Luddites, or about the utopian socialists, and I appreciated Cassidy's knowledge of the Keynesians, a school of thought he seems to uphold the most.

What I most enjoyed, despite his skepticism of 20th century Marxism, was that he took capitalism's critics very seriously, and faithfully expounded upon their views. Amazingly, despite providing 50 reasons or more to oppose capitalism, he himself seems to remain not fully convinced. One gets the impression that Cassidy simply wants to reform capitalism, make it kinder. One of the major themes of the book is the system's resilience, and this resilience seems to prevent him from believing that a post-capitalist world is even possible. I feel sorry for him in this respect.

[Anuj · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World, by John Cassidy, is an ambitious and impressively accessible survey of the long intellectual struggle over capitalism’s moral, economic, and social legitimacy. Rather than offering a defence or a demolition of capitalism, Cassidy sets out to map the terrain of its critics, from early moral philosophers and social reformers to Marxists, Keynesians, environmentalists, and contemporary sceptics of neoliberalism, showing how each emerged from specific historical pressures and anxieties.

One of the book’s great strengths is its balance. Cassidy treats his subjects with seriousness and sympathy, even when he ultimately disagrees with them. He is particularly good at identifying the internal tensions and blind spots in many critiques of capitalism, noting where critics underestimated capitalism’s adaptability, overestimated the coherence of their own alternatives, or ignored uncomfortable trade-offs. At the same time, he avoids complacency: a recurring theme is that many older criticisms, about inequality, instability, financial excess, and the corrosive effects of markets on social life, remain stubbornly relevant today, even if their original formulations now feel dated.

The book’s panoramic scope is another major asset. Cassidy moves fluently across centuries, disciplines, and geographies, and he devotes real attention to figures who rarely appear in mainstream accounts of political economy. The chapter on J. C. Kumarappa, for example, stands out as a thoughtful exploration of a Gandhian, anti-industrial critique of capitalism that feels strikingly contemporary in an age of climate anxiety and debates about sustainable development. Throughout, Cassidy’s clear prose and journalistic instincts make complex ideas readable without flattening them.

Overall, Capitalism and Its Critics succeeds as both intellectual history and contemporary diagnosis. It does not pretend that capitalism has a single fatal flaw or a single silver-bullet alternative. Instead, it shows that capitalism has always been shaped, and often improved, by its critics, even when those critics were wrong in important ways. For readers looking for an accessible, nuanced, and historically grounded account of why capitalism remains so contested, this is an excellent place to start.

[Cgallozzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book.

This excellent book provides a 'history of Capitalism' - through the eyes of its (Capitalism's) critics.

This book also indicates that Capitalism has reformed itself several times so as to address some of the criticisms made against it. An open question remaining is whether Capitalism can again reform itself to deal with current and future challenges such as sustainable environmental focus; broad distribution of A I and its economic and social impacts, the alleged retreat of Globalization and the global debt problem. For perspective on this issue - The Communist Manifesto thought Capitalism would not be able to reform itself when the book was written in the 1840's.

Cassidy details a broad list of Capitalism's critics - Socialists, Conservatives, John Maynard Keynes, Thomas Piketty and even zero growth/degrowth advocates.

Many many criticisms of (the negative impacts of Capitalism) remain relevant today - income inequality and the environmental impact of fossil fuel led growth among others.

I read this book as a compendium of Economic thoughts/ideologies - detailing mainstream Capitalism's successes and failures and discussing its critics and their thought models. A great learning experience for those interested in historical and contemporary Economics.

You need to 'pay attention' while reading (listening) this book.

I've read several of the texts authored by the named Critics (Piketty for one) - I find Cassidy's summary of Piketty's thoughts generally 'on the mark'. I find the overall tone 'balanced' with several critics - generating criticism from the right; critics from the left; and critics who are anarchists/revolutionaries - all are fairly represented here.

In the context of a discussion of economic thought and criticism - it is a very well written and well researched book. I highly recommend this book - it should be of interest to those who read economics.

Carl Gallozzi
Cgallozzi@comcast.net

[Julio The Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Capitalism and baseball: Deep in this book John Cassidy remarks that critics of capitalism fall into two categories, likening them to people who attend a baseball game: Some are there to root for one team over the other, others come to tear down the stadium. Since he squarely puts himself in the first category there is not much bite or suspense in this sweeping survey of capitalism and its discontents. Cassidy is of the "mend it, don't end it" party. He equates capitalism with an economic system "that is profit driven". Wrong. The pharaohs of Egypt and Roman emperors strove for profits, that didn't make them capitalists. Comrade Cassidy also thinks capitalism means only European capitalism. Wrong again. Without the profits derived from the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the New World and the African slave trade there would have been no industrial revolution in Europe, and since Cassidy devotes a chapter to Eric Williams' classic study CAPITALISM AND SLAVERY, which documents this very thesis, he has no excuse for ignoring the American and African roots of capitalism. Erratum number three: Cassidy believes capitalism is only an economic system. Ha! Conservative critics of capitalism, including Thomas Carlyle in his bucolics for England, William Faulkner in his short story "The Bear", Robert Penn Warren and other Agrarian critics in "I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition", and Daniel Bell (THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF CAPITALISM) have expounded at length on the alienating effects of the free market and commodification. I, for one, am glad Cassidy introduced me to the Wages for Housework Campaign; a push by feminists to recognize and reward household work by women and other caregivers, but that is a pearl among swine. If you are willing to overlook all his faults by all means read Cassidy, but you won't gain much insight into capitalism or its most pungent critics.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a staff writer for The New Yorker, Cassidy profiles dozens of the most vocal and powerful critics of capitalism, documenting its history from the East India Company to the era of artificial intelligence. The fundamental criticisms of capitalism, according to Cassidy, have not changed much over the centuries: it is "soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive," but it is also "all-conquering and overwhelming."

In addition to well-known figures like Thomas Piketty, John Maynard Keynes, Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Marx, the story also discusses lesser-known but equally important critics like the Luddites, Irish proto-socialist William Thompson, French unionist Flora Tristan, conservative Thomas Carlyle, and Indian economist J. C. Kumarappa.

Capitalism's "remarkable knack for reinventing itself" and its astounding "powers of self-regeneration and survivability," which have enabled it to weather multiple crises and evade the ultimate collapse that some of its detractors had predicted, are fundamental themes.

Since growing inequality, climate change, and artificial intelligence raise serious concerns about the viability and ethics of the current economic system, the book is positioned as a work that is relevant to the times. According to Cassidy, the prevailing ideologies of free-market neoliberalism and Keynesian social democracy are "running aground," so it is critical to find alternatives.
According to reviews, the book humanizes what is sometimes a dry subject matter by combining a lively examination of economic theories, a comprehensive history, and a rich biography.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book about the critics. Some famous, others not and I can’t remember the not famous ones… capitalism refers to the laissez-faire kind of capitalism with no oversight, no government support kind. With every criticism came improvement of the system.

1. Adam smith complained about the collusion of merchants, or oligopolies. So we have anti-trust laws.
2. Luddites: not against technology per se, but against how workers were treated as they were replaced by women and children in factories. They were doomed as the British government was determined to protect the factory owners then.
3. Charles Dickens and others’ descriptions of the working class helped changed workers’ safety laws, and laws prohibiting child labour.
4. Communes: most communes failed or could not get the funding to get started, as most states would not support it because they want to be self sufficient and not pay taxes.
5. Communism; the big one. Marx thought that capitalism will self destruct as profit falls, overproduction happens and wealth inequality decreases demand. But pure communism always fails as it removes the profit motive and property rights. So the Soviet Union peasants killed their livestock when the state was going to confiscate them. And to do that the state must always use violence. So massive killings in the Soviet Union, Cambodia and others. Whenever the state nationalises industries, in effect steal from it, the industry would collapse because of inefficient management (such as promising to employment all new graduates).