Capitalism and Its Critics
A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
by John Cassidy
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Pub Date May 13 2025 | Archive Date Jun 13 2025
Description
A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025
A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics.
At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, inequality, trade wars, and a right-wing populist backlash to globalization are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, 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, Polanyi―but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; Thomas Carlyle, the conservative prophet of the moral depredations of the market; 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; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of Keynes; and Samir Amin, the leftist French-Egyptian economist and analyst of globalization.
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.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“Fascinating and informative. The history of capitalism is told through the eyes and legitimate concerns of its most articulate critics. This is intellectual history at its best. Essential reading for anyone who wonders how the modern world wandered off course.” —Simon Johnson, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and co-author of Power and Progress
“John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics is an impressive history of arguments about capitalism, from the industrial age to our time. Clear and accessible, it is an invaluable touchstone for current debates about economic renewal in our post-globalization moment.” —Michael Sandel, author of The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?
"Capitalism and its Critics is everything that we’ve come to expect from John Cassidy. He weaves an engaging and trenchant discussion of key critics of capitalism over its more than 200 years into a history of capitalism itself. The battle is not only about economic ideas, but about the very nature of our society. Especially now, when some see the failures of capitalism as more than a little responsible for the Trumpian oligarchy, while others see its successes as ushering in a new era of AI-led prosperity, this is an illuminating and essential read.” —Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
"It’s about time we had a history of capitalism told through the eyes of its critics. For too long the predominant global system for safeguarding the power of the few against the needs of the many has been thought of like the weather: inevitable and eternal, something that cannot be changed, that can only be borne or enjoyed, depending on the day. Cassidy is more storyteller than bomb thrower, and one can only hope this gets the mainstream attention it deserves." —Literary Hub
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374601089 |
| PRICE | $36.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 624 |
