Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World

by John Cassidy

** A Financial Times Best Summer Book of 2025**
A sweeping history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics

At a time when we are faced with fundamental questions about the sustainability and morality of the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from colonialism and the Industrial Revolution to the ecological crisis and artificial intelligence.

John Cassidy adopts a bold new he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From eighteenth-century weavers who rebelled against early factory automation to Eric Williams's paradigm-changing work on slavery and capitalism, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It looks at familiar figures – Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi – from a fresh perspective, but also focuses on many less familiar, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labour union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; and J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics.

Blending biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction, Politics, History

607 pages, Kindle Edition

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

[Marko Beljac · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really like John Cassidy – my type of autodidact English working class intellectual with a deep interest and understanding of economics and its perennial subject matter, capitalism. I came to this book primarily through Cassidy’s "How Markets Fail" which was not just a superb account of market failure. It doubled as an astute survey of contemporary economic thought, and one written in compelling fashion. This book too was fantastic. My own view is that the Left has three essential pillars. Firstly, to be on the Left is to be anticapitalist – whether reformist or revolutionary if you’re part of the Left you find something irksome about capitalism. You count yourself one of her critics. Secondly, to be on the Left is to be internationalist. This is because of your core value of solidarity – you are for the suffering and miserable roaming the Earth no matter colour, nation, God. Thirdly, you seek to leave society more democratic than you found her. Yours is a radical democracy wanting to restore agency to the voiceless, power to the powerless. No role here for a vanguard party. In Cassidy’s "Capitalism and Its Critics," you read about a select, though richly diverse, group of economic thinkers who have found something problematical about capitalism. My favourite chapters were on Nikolai Kondratiev, Karl Polanyi, Paul Sweezy and Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, Flora Tristan and the United Workers’ Union, Eric Williams on Slavery and Capitalism, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and the Limits to Growth (even though I don’t really believe in the limits to growth lolz). Hayek and Friedman?! Fuck them. You won’t find any philosopher critics of capitalism in the Cassidy book – this is about economic critics of capitalism. I am against capitalism for philosophical, not economic, reasons. I am against capitalism because capitalism subjects the broad mass of the population, what we call the working class, to a necessarily hierarchical relationship of dependency to the owners of the means of production. Capitalism compels us to labour and to toil for those who own and manage capital, and so we live lives of necessity and subordination not lives of creativity and freedom. To be a free, creative, sentimental being is what it means to be human and when we are compelled to work for a small economic elite, we are not free, creative beings no matter the splendour and wonder of what we produce. You see this type of critique in Wilhelm von Humboldt's "Limits to State Action," Marx's conception of alienation, even Adam Smith's division of labour, which all can be traced to Descartes' dualistic theory of substance in my opinion. We become mechanical beings playing a functional and subordinate role in an inherently hierarchical society controlled not by beings of sentiment so much as beings of avarice. So, rage against the machine comrades.

[Hassan Pesaran]

A book that reveals the enormity of its ambition slowly, almost by stealth. Cassidy traces the history of the modern world through biographies of economic thinkers and their ideas. We start in the Industrial Revolution, through to mercantile capitalism and the East India Company, the shocks of the Great Depression and World Wars, and globalisation at the start of the 21st century.

A few takeaways
- Ideas do matter. They’ve shaped policy, politics and economics. And there are people that shape those ideas. Economic theory is rarely just theoretical: those people have motivations and a politics. Whether that’s Polanyi’s experience of fascism, or Engel’s closeness to the factory floor.
- The thinkers build grand theories that look to explain everything, but generally one idea persists even the whole theory doesn’t quite work. Like Kondratiev’s waves or Veblen’s leisure class.
- Capitalism has been a lot of different things. It’s not one idea. Laissez faire capitalism is different from managed capitalism is different from mercantile capitalism is different from racial capitalism.

I was really energised reading this. So many ideas that are fundamental to how the world works are laid out so cleanly here. And Cassidy is fair in his appraisal of each: where they fall short, where they hold true. And he’s clear when he finds some distasteful (at best) - like Hayek and Friedman.

When he brings us into the present day, I found myself a bit exasperated. The answers to today’s ‘polycrises’ felt simultaneously obvious having read the previous 500 pages (don’t we just need to ‘manage’ social media platforms like Keynes might suggest? why can’t we introduce the wealth taxes that Piketty suggests?) but they also seem so out of reach.

[Chelsea Knowles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great overview on the history of capitalism and economic theorists. It felt very accessible and I liked reading it. I liked how the author laid out what each theorist thought and why they thought the way they did. It felt very balanced and unbiased. The writing was good and I enjoyed this.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book, and a must read for anyone interested in economics and beyond. Some familiar names covered, but more importantly some people I have never heard of, and quite rightly given the recognition they truely deserve.

[Tom.Godfrey]

I found this one a little boring. I can’t seem to recall why. Hence I don’t think it’s conscionable to leave a star review.