FIRST DRAFT:
Draft review of John Cassidy: "Capitalism & Its Critics". 2025-04-07…
Let me cut to the chase:
Where does the book that is John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics travel to and arrive at, at the end, To mix metaphors, Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics is a polyphony. It is without a single dominant note, chord, or phrase. It, rather, has repeated themes—themes sounded again and again as Cassidy traverses 250 years and thirty-odd observers and critics of capitalism. For, in Cassidy’s words, “the central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming…”
(1) Principally, to my ear, of Cassidy’s repeatedly sounded themes is that of capitalism’s critics not making up any sort of coherent whole but still very much worth listening to. At best, truly strange bedfollows. For, as Thomas Carlyle put it, the critics of capitalism (including himself) are or are transmitting not plans for a new and better order, but rather “popular commotions and maddest bellowings”. These commotions and bellowings “from Peterloo to the Place-de-Grève… [are] inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain; [and] to the ear of wisdom… [are] prayers: ‘Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!’…”. For, put much more charitably than Carlyle’s ventriloquism of the Chartist activists, the system violates what my friend Dan Davies sets as a sine quo non principle of human organizations. He believes “Big corporations and states need to have information channels… “red handle signals”… [to] bypass the normal hierarchy and get information to the decision making centre, in time…. The lack of that… has caused so many schemes to fail, and its continued presence… highly unsatisfactory and attenuated… accounts for the fact that the democratic industrialised world still does kind of work, a bit…”
But in capitalism there is only one information channel: the price. And—no matter what the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde genius-idiot Friedrich von Hayek may have claimed—that is not enough to keep any large-scale societal network-system from going off the rails.
But there is no consensus about what kind of, at a minimum, red-handle signals need to be built in. As John Maynard Keynes wrote a century ago in an earlier systemic crisis of the applied-science society capitalism of his age: “We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas…. No one has a gospel. The next move is with the head…” But we have been unable to even begin to make that move since the post-2007 breakdown of the authority of North Atlantic political economy’s Neoliberal Order
(2) Almost as prominent of the themes in the polyphony—at least to my ear—is Cassidy’s belief that now, finally, 250 years after he starts his survey, capitalism is ending with fragmentation and incoherence. Nearly half of Americans seeing capitalism as on the wrong path; new conservatives joining the left-wing critiques of globalization and financialization; leftists and conservatives alike blaming capitalism for “collapsed communities” and cultural degradation; believers in state-guided capitalism vs laissez-faire anarchy techno-utopians hoping cyberspace will route around all governments; the vanishing of the New Deal Order dominant coalition of labor, scale-economy mass-production industry, and Keynesian technocrats; the decline of the Neoliberal Order alliance of globalization-embracing educated elites and free-market ideologues; hopes we will be saved by teamwork-based open-source; hopes that the gig economy might be a source of liberation (rather than of worker speedup, with the Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles as they bring things to my house, and my last Uber driver getting only 25% of what I paid the app); the right-wing populism of the billionaires; left-wing protest encampments, cooperatives, and artisanal networks pushing for “degrowth”, commons-based activism, and gift economies.
This is, I think, flatly wrong. People would have said the same in the mid-1930s, not seeing the New Deal Order of mass-production capitalism sprouting all around them. People did say the same thing in the 1970s, not understanding the speed with which capitalism was transforming itself into its globalized value-chain variant that would then so strongly underpin the Neoliberal Order. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1857 may have been the first to mistake the birth pangs of a new mutation of capitalism for the beast’s final death throws. Don’t make their mistake—as Cassidy almost does, before pulling back at the last.
(3) For, as Cassidy does stress repeatedly and strongly, capitalism mutates. Indeed, it mutates so many times and so comprehensively each time that I have given up using the bare word “capitalism”. These days I will teach about classical-world capitalism, mediæval capitalism, agricultural capitalism, colonial capitalism, mercantile capitalism, steampower capitalism, applied-science capitalism, mass-production capitalism, globalized value-chain capitalism, and now attention info-bio tech capitalism—you need at least ten, rather than to think that in some way it is the same beast (or draw only a single distinction between “capitalism” and “late capitalism”).
Since capitalism mutates, no one single system of societal and political regulation, no single political-economy order, can be both durable and satisfactory for long. The pseudo-democratic semi-liberal Belle Époque order of the steampower-age capitalism of the half-century before World War I did give humanity the best half-century it had ever had: “economic El Dorado”, as John Maynard Keynes put it, of previously unimagined general prosperity plus growing democracy and reduced hierarchy and oppression. But as steampower capitalism morphed into applied-science capitalism, the old political-economy order and attempts to restore it to health brought first World War I, and then a Great Depression with the concommitant rise of Fascism, Naziism, Stalinism, and Imperial Japan’s catching of a new bad variant of the western European nationalist-racist-imperialist virus. Only die-hard card-carrying Neoliberals still dare to claim today that the shift from the social-democratic New Deal to the Neoliberal Order was a satisfactory way of managing capitalism’s mutation from its mass-production to its globalized value-chain variant. And now we have no clue what political economy would allow human flourishing as capitalism’s genome shifts again to what we will perhaps call the capitalism of the attention info-bio tech age.
(4) Cassidy sees—especially now, but also repeatedly in the past—capitalism delegitimizing itself. I think here he suffers from an optical illusion, from a near-sighted myopia. Over its very long career, capitalism has very rarely been seen as legitimate by anyone. Yes: the post-1980 pre-2008 Neoliberal Order did contain an extravagant ideological claim that capitalism, or democratic capitalism, was in some sense a legitimate order. But not even Friedrich von Hayek saw it as in any sense moral. Hayek’s ideas were: (a) A market economy and private property—capitalism—make up a mighty and powerful human social engineering device for attaining prosperity by crowdsourcing the best attainable solutions to the problems of what to make and how to make it. (b) But it produces great inequality and unfairness, as it rewards not the truly deserving but rather those lucky enough to control the right resources at the right time. (c) Howver, alternatives fail to produce prosperity without producing anything anyone might ever reasonably call social justice; the alternatives reward not the lucky and the productive but rather the powerful—whether aristocracies, oligarchies, or some managerial “new class”. (d) Hence capitalism places us in the position of Job: we need to accept that “capitalism giveth, capitalism taketh away: blessed be capitalism’s name”, for kicking against that reality will produce the catastrophe of putting us on one of the many roads to serfdom.
It was only during the Neoliberal Order’s heyday that things went further. Only then there serious claims that greed was good per se—that success in the capitalist marketplace was the sole touchstone to true moral virtue and deservingness. Otherwise, capitalism has been seen as legitimate only when properly managed, either by a democracy or by some aristocracy of power, wealth, culture, or technocratic expertise.
And I hear many more repeated themes in this book of 260,000 covering thirty-odd observers and critics of the thing “capitalism” across two and a half centuries.
How did John Cassidy—one of the very best economic journalists we have here in the world today, and one of the very few who does not work for a business élite-oriented publication—come to write this book?
He says that he started out conceiving of his book as “a shortish history of contemporary capitalism and… economic debates… from the collapse of the Soviet Union…”. to the present. He quickly found himself, as one does, being dragged further back into the past: ending up reading Adam Smith on the “privileged position and egregious self-dealing” of the East India Company, concluding that most “criticisms of modern capitalism” are rooted in “developments and debates… [from] the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain and even before that”, and so picking his thirty-odd subjects.
Having myself just three years ago published a book that came in at 190,000 words (as I failed to cut more of my own original half-million words of drafts and notes), I understand how Cassidy wound up here with this book inside one single set of covers. But its length makes reading the book a major commitment. For those of us who choose to listen to the audiobook at 1.5-speed it will take twenty-eight hours. For the typical reader of Democracy Journal, it would take seventeen. I am fortunate and blessed: it took me seven from cover-to-cover.
But if we really want the books we read to become a true part of us and our mental panoply, we need to do more than just read it cover-to-cover, once. We need to read actively. We start with the black squiggles on the page. From them we spin up a sub-Turing instantiation of the mind of the author. We then run that sub-Turing instantiation on our own wetware—and argue with it. We argue with it while reading, while reflecting, in the shower, and walking the dog. And so we truly learn. By the end, I had spent twenty hours with John Cassidy in the form of this book (plus more: I remember well his New Yorker articles—“The Fountainhead”, “Smoke Signals”, “Motown Down”, “A World of Woes: A Global Take on a Decade of Financial Crises”, and more). And then I sat down to write this review.
Was it worth spending my time on this, rather than on something else? For me, Cassidy’s book gave me:
a visa to seven thinkers who are important guys whom I readily did not know, and ought to have: Bolts, Thompson, Wheeler, Tristan, Kondratiev, Kumarappa, Georgescu-Roegen, and Federici.
the opportunity to revisit and rethink my scant knowledge and unformed views about six more: Carlyle, George, Veblen, Hobson, Sweezy, and Williams.
and the John Stuart Millian impulsion to take seriously what a smart person who thinks differently than me thinks about issues and authors that I think I know very well indeed—Smith, General Ludd, Engels, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Kalecki, Robinson, Prebisch, Friedman, Hall, Hayek, Amin, Rodrik, Stiglitz, and Piketty.
For me, reading and thinking and then writing up this review of Cassidy was very much worth doing. Perhaps I feel like Yakov at Jabbok’s Ford, having wrestled all night with the shadowy figure that was the High God El—and emerged having gained strength, for El only won as dawn was breaking by cheating. For me, it was a great treat. It was very much worth doing. And not because I will be paid $850 by Democracy Journal.
Is it worth reading Cassidy from cover-to-cover? Well, what else would you do with your time? What other big books are you going to read this year? if you buy it and start it, you will indeed find on every page something that will make you glad to have read the page, and enough narrative forward momentum to make you eager to turn the page. But the pile of very good books you might read this year is high. And Capitalism and Its Critics is likely to crowd two others out of your reading life.
Is it worth buying Cassidy and dipping into the text periodically, even if you do not think you will ever manage to read it cover-to-cover? Here again I say: Yes. If you have a book budget big enough to include things you are not overwhelmingly likely to read cover-to-cover, John Cassidy’s Capitalism & Its Critics belongs inside it.
But suppose that you are mostly interested in understanding how to interpret references to this book as it serves, as I think it is very likely to, as an intellectual buoy to help you orient yourself in our current sea of troubles. Suppose you want some idea of what this book is about to help you understand what will probably be a number of conversations you will have and overhear that will refer to it. Or suppose, less charitably, that you want to appear a knowledgeable, erudite, au courant person.
What then?
Well, that is one thing that reviews like this are for, isn’t it?
References:
Cassidy, John. 2025. Capitalism and Its Critics: A History, from the Industrial Revolution to AI. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Davies, Dan. 2024. “Seeing Like a State Machine.” Back of Mind (Substack), March 30. <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-state-machine>.
Davies, Dan. 2024. The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions—and How the World Lost Its Mind. London: Profile Books. <https://profilebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/wpallimport/files/PDFs/9781788169547_preview.pdf>.