Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy

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

By John Cassidy

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

A six-hundred-page broken record is probably too severe a description of Capitalism and Its Critics, the new book from John Cassidy, staff writer at The New Yorker. But not by much. As Cassidy notes (or admits, depending on your point of view) in this “history of capitalism through the eyes of its critics,”

In whittling things down, I was greatly helped by the fact that, over the centuries, the central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitive, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming.

He’s assisted by a lot more than that. Cassidy eases his burden, and continues a rich tradition on the left, through a tired act of conflation:

I follow the lead of the German historian Jürgen Kocka … in treating merchant capitalism, plantation economies, and industrial capitalism as variants of the same genus. I also use the term colonial capitalism, which, roughly speaking, applies to the period of 1500 to 1800.

This approach, let’s call it, generates a few passages that would stop any ordinary reader:

From the nineteenth-century ideal of free trade and small government that was pioneered by Britain; to the autarkic capitalism of Nazi Germany; to the Keynesian managed capitalism of the postwar era; to the globalized hypercapitalism of the late twentieth century; to the Chinese state capitalism that some observers see as the wining model for the twenty-first century – there have been many varieties of capitalism.

But this book isn’t for ordinary readers. That’s obvious from the start, because most ordinary readers aren’t tripping over people in a rush to their nearest bookstore so they can devour primers on the ideas of figures like Karl Planyi, Joan Robinson, and Thomas Piketty (and these aren’t even the obscure critics Cassidy digs up). But more to the point, this book is not for the kind of reader who will read a passage of that sort and think maybe we’re collapsing distinct things into one big thing we don’t like. No, it is for the kind of reader who won’t blink when you offhandedly inform them that “[t]he completion of the transcontinental rail link. . .signaled a fresh triumph for American industrial capitalism, which just two years earlier had finally prevailed over Southern plantation capitalism in the Civil War.”

This slant, as it’s politely called, is the main element potential readers should be aware of because it also occurs in a way that is increasingly common in books of this kind. The basic problem is one of academic islands - islands where scholars of like-minds largely talk to, and work with, each other. In books for a popular audience, the result is an amalgamation of dubious and partisan material alongside a certain amount of good work. Thomas Piketty’s books are quintessential examples, as is Cassidy’s chapter on Piketty himself. But it crops up everywhere, so arguing that Karl Marx’s labor theory of value “can’t be entirely dismissed” and then citing Anwar Shaikh and his students’ empirical work as evidence isn’t going to impress skeptical readers who know that work. The issue, obviously, is when the reader doesn’t know.

Taking all of this and gently setting it aside to cool off, it is worth mentioning that this book will please a number of readers. To his great credit, given the abstruse subject matter, Cassidy introduces you to a healthy number of influential critics and a vast array of ideas in perfectly clear and approachable language. For example, although it feels a bit incomplete (an issue, if inevitable, with parts of this book), it’s possible that a newcomer might find his coverage of the Cambridge capital controversy, a famous black hole in economic theory from which many economists never emerged, understandable.

While the book’s stated conceit is to give a history of capitalism, and it sort of does that, it really amounts to a primer on a range of thinkers’ work as it relates to capitalism in their time, which isn’t exactly the same thing. Also, the thinkers are nearly all on the left, with some exceptions like Thomas Carlyle and, almost cleverly, Adam Smith (because of his criticisms of colonialism and slavery). More attention to right-wing critics, especially in our time, might have been appropriate. On his system for inclusion, Cassidy tells us that he “[s]ome of my choices were dictated by a desire for subjects who captured an entire epoch, others by a wish to highlight lesser-known figures who made interesting contributions,” which amounts to saying he selected whomever he wanted.

This produces in some questionable inclusions and omissions but isn’t much of an issue, since he covers so much ground. Most sections are nicely contained, but there are rare issues such as the chapter on Friedrich Engels which turns essentially into a chapter on Marx midway through. If the book is missing anything, it’s the bite that can be so vibrant in many of these critic’s own writings. Whatever we think of their work, a genuine outrage and sense of injustice motivated serious minds like Rosa Luxemburg, so it’s a shame when that feeling is told instead of conveyed. In short, when John Cassidy isn’t out for lunch Capitalism and Its Critics is an interesting compendium that will certainly reach the readers for which it is intended.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.