Capitalism and Its Critics
A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025
A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2025
A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics.
Capitalism has long been understood as a driving force behind the biggest political, economic, and social dislocations of our time. But in this sweeping, kaleidoscopic history of the economic system that has shaped our world, the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Cassidy adopts a bold new approach: he examines global capitalism through the eyes of its critics.
From the English Luddites, who rebelled against early factory automation, to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, this absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names—Smith, Carlyle, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi—but also focuses on many lesser-known 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 Gandhian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; and Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War.
Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics tells an expansive story that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues we face today, from widening inequality and the ecological crisis to technological transformation and resurgent authoritarian politics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sweeping account, Pulitzer finalist Cassidy (How Markets Fail) profiles figures who have opposed capitalism over the past two centuries. Since "the rise of factory production," Cassidy notes, "critics from the right as well as the left" have made moral arguments against capitalism's "dehumanizing effect" and its "upending of... social norms." He begins with the hardscrabble Luddites—early 19th-century English weavers who attacked the mechanical looms that had eradicated their communal way of life—and traces how they were succeeded by more genteel political organizers who advocated for socialism, a system of communal work and shared responsibilities. Cassidy offers a deft, thorough reading of Marx and his "scientific" approach, which identified the mechanics by which capitalism exploited and alienated workers. But he revels most in spotlighting figures with less well-known critiques, like "arch-conservative" Thomas Carlyle—who objected to capitalism for having replaced traditional social bonds with a "cash nexus"—and Trinidadian economist Eric Williams, who in 1942 was the first to argue that colonialism and the slave trade had created the social conditions for capitalism's economic success. Cassidy's masterful synthesis of history and biography serves to demonstrate that capitalism is in a permanent state of change not just because of its fundamental nature, but because of how it's continuously being subjected to pushback. The result is a unique and invigorating view of capitalism's history.
