How is it that an eighteenth-century Scottish moral philosopher came to be featured on neck ties worn by Nobel laureate economists and cited by presidents and prime ministers? That, in essence, is the question Glory Liu sets out to answer in Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism.

The book is not a biography of Adam Smith the man, nor is it an exposition of his ideas. It is a biography, as Jennifer Burns described it in the Wall Street Journal, of Adam Smith the idea. It surveys the variety of causes—mostly in America—that the name Adam Smith has been invoked to support. It elaborates some of the competing ‘Adam Smiths’ that have emerged in the last 250 years and that to some extent remain with us today.

The book is not simply a historiography of Smith scholarship. It is offered as a window into the ‘politics of political economy,’ a phrase used to capture the fact that descriptive efforts in political economy are not easily disentangled from the ethical and political commitments of practitioners. Studying the receptions of Adam Smith foregrounds various rhetorical and normative dimensions of economic science.

After an introduction, Chapter 1 of the book treats the initial reception of The Wealth of Nations by Smith’s contemporaries. Smith’s friends and associates enthusiastically praised the book and perceived its scientific import. Thomas Pownall, a British MP and former governor of Massachusetts Bay, hailed the book as a successful exposition of social Newtonianism. The Wealth of Nations contained ‘the principia of those laws of motion, by which the system of the human community is framed and doth act.’

The founders of the American republic received the book as an authoritative treatment of the subject of political economy and an extension of the British ‘science of man.’ They drew on its arguments as one might draw on an academic anthology. James Madison found in its pages a compelling description of the effects of faction. Alexander Hamilton found competent discussions of wide set of issues pertaining to national wealth and public finance. Rather than The Wealth of Nations, John Adams turned to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments to reflect on the moral psychology of wealth.

Chapter 2 deals with the emergence in the nineteenth century of the image of Smith as the founder of modern political economy. In America, the primary platform for Smith’s ideas in the early nineteenth century was the college classroom. Although infrequently assigned as a college textbook, arguments from The Wealth of Nations were incorporated into standard textbooks of the day, such Francis Wayland’s Elements of Political Economy. Within the shifting contours of the field over the century, the academic status of Smith’s work was somewhat amorphous, as Liu describes it, but Smith nonetheless became an increasingly important focal point in academic discourse. Political economists of all stripes saw the need to read and take Smith’s arguments seriously, either to debunk his analysis or affirm their own positions. His reputation and authority grew, as one nineteenth century literary critic quoted by Liu put it, by virtue of ‘the care and acumen which succeeding writers have bestowed upon Wealth of Nations.’

Academic engagement with Smith’s ideas coincided with increasingly polemical political engagement on the issue of free trade, which is the subject of Chapter 3. In their vigorous disagreements about tariff policy, northern and southern American politicians alike recruited Smith to their cause. Southern politicians found in Smith a convenient figurehead for the cause of free trade, which they favored due to the large market Britian provided for their cotton exports. Northern proponents of Henry Clay’s ‘American System’ of high manufacturing tariffs and infrastructure spending ceded the point that Smith presumptively favored free trade, but they latched on to the exceptions Smith made to his presumptions, making use of an ‘even-Smith-said-so’ logic.

The growing authority of Adam Smith the idea is apparent in the use of his ideas by the early American institutional and historical economists towards the end of the nineteenth century, such as Richard Ely and Edwin Seligman. Seligman especially drew on German readings of Smith emphasizing Smith’s historical bent (evident especially in Book III of Wealth of Nations), pragmatism, and somewhat elastic vision of the role of government. Liu shows throughout Chapter 4 how Ely and Seligman, just as American politicians and academics before them, made Adam Smith in their own image as a would-be supporter of progressive American politics.

Like the late-nineteenth-century progressives, the twentieth century Chicago economists—especially the ‘new’ Chicago school of Milton Friedman and George Stigler—similarly recreated Adam Smith in their own image. The ‘old’ Chicago school of Jacob Viner and Frank Knight maintained, in Liu’s telling, a mostly balanced view of Smith as a cautious, non-dogmatic advocate of free markets with some ethical scruples about the commercial order. Friedman and Stigler and F.A. Hayek—who, it should be said was a somewhat peripheral figure in Chicago economics and never a part of the core Chicago school of thought—departed from the interpretations of their predecessors. They fashioned Smith not simply into an apostle of free trade, as the nineteenth century Southern congressmen had done, but a broader advocate of sweeping de-governmentalization. The Chicago Smith cast a long shadow. According to Liu, it is the Chicago construction of Smith that is largely responsible for popular conceptions of Smith as an apologist for individualism and market efficiency and an opponent of government intervention and collective action broadly.

The story about the Chicago School, told in Chapters 5 and 6, is the climax of the book. Chapter 7 treats the efforts by Donald Winch, Albert Hirschman, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, and Knud Haaksonssen after 1976 to recover a broader, contextual understanding of ‘the real’ Adam Smith, especially the political and moral dimensions of his thought. Gertrude Himmelfarb’s and Irving Kristol’s work to articulate a Smithian moral economy, with emphasis on the historical Smith’s care for the poor, also features. The Epilogue surveys the Smith scholarship renaissance of the past decades.

Adam Smith’s America is a remarkable scholarly achievement. It should be read and studied by historians of politics and economics and, of course, by Adam Smith scholars. In addition to its virtues as work of intellectual history, the book ably challenges those of us keen to invoke the venerable name of Adam Smith to pause and consider what we are asking Smith to do for us and why. Liu’s book magnificently frames the question: why do we read Adam Smith?

Liu, it must be said, is not innocent of the tendency she so ably diagnoses in others to eclipse context and shape history according to precommitments. She remarkably omits an able Smith scholar and Nobel laureate from Chicago from her narrative: Ronald Coase (1910-2013). Perhaps this is because Coase somewhat complicates the story about the Chicago Smith caricature, and she wants to foreground the idea that there is something fundamentally un-Smithian about Hayek, Friedman, and especially Stigler. Stigler’s reading of Smith evidently has its issues. But Hayek and Friedman were careful readers and generally sound interpreters of Smith’s corpus. Liu does not marshal any substantive evidence to the contrary, but simply resorts to charging Hayek with deploying his reading of Smith opportunistically and Friedman with exaggerating the importance of the invisible hand metaphor. More generally along these lines, the subtitle of the book suggests that Liu wants to communicate to reader that the ‘real’ Smith would likely have disapproved of the association of his name with modern American capitalism, although why exactly this is the case—or what ‘American capitalism’ actually entails—is never explicitly spelled out.

If political economy has inevitably political dimensions, so too do reception histories of the kind offered in Adam Smith’s America. The book tells us that many of us likely engage with Smith in ways that comport with our broader ethical and political visions. The book shows us, albeit inadvertently, that we might engage similarly even with the history of Smith’s reception. In a way, though, this observation makes Liu’s central thesis all the more persuasive.

‘Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism’ by Glory Liu was originally published in 2022 by Princeton University Press (ISBN 978-0-691-24086-2). 384pp. A paperback edition was published in 2024. 

Erik Matson is Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, Deputy Director of the Adam Smith Program at George Mason University, and Lecturer in Political Economy at The Catholic University of America

Nearly a century later, the Great Depression still shapes how we think about the government’s role in America’s free enterprise system. That lasting influence is no surprise: the Depression remains the most severe economic contraction in U.S. history. Between 1929 and 1933, per capita GDP fell by roughly 30 percent, industrial production by nearly 50 percent, unemployment soared to almost 25 percent, and close to a third of the nation’s banks failed. Just as important, however, the Depression triggered a fundamental shift in how the government responds to recessions—a transformation that continues to shape policy today.

At the center of that shift was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a set of policies aimed at promoting recovery, providing relief, and laying the groundwork for long-term reform. Yet despite decades of scholarship, two central questions remain: What ended the Depression—and what role, if any, did the New Deal play? In False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, George Selgin takes up these questions directly. Drawing on contemporary accounts of the Depression and the New Deal, retrospective assessments from the decades that followed, and modern scholarship, Selgin makes a compelling case that the New Deal not only failed to promote recovery but likely delayed it.

By the numbers, the New Deal’s record on recovery is hard to defend. Although the economy improved markedly during FDR’s first term, by 1939—a year after the New Deal had effectively ended as a legislative program—it remained in poor shape despite the administration’s recovery efforts. Roughly 17 percent of the labor force was still either unemployed or on work relief—which, as Selgin notes, even New Dealers regarded as a poor substitute for real employment. Industrial production had barely edged above its level from a decade earlier, and per capita GDP was still below its 1929 peak.

Why, then, did the New Deal’s promise of recovery go unrealized?

One major reason, Selgin maintains, is that the New Deal’s signature legislative achievements—such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)—facilitated the cartelization of agriculture, industry, and labor—hardly a recipe for recovery. The AAA sought to raise farm prices by restricting output; the NIRA aimed to achieve the same for industrial prices, while also raising wages through higher minimums and enhanced union power. In both cases, the New Dealers mistook a symptom of the Depression—falling prices and wages—for its cause. The result was sadly predictable: prices and wages rose, but output and employment fell.

As misguided as the AAA and NIRA were, Selgin argues, the deeper problem lay not in any single intervention, but in the uncertainty created by the administration’s constant policy experimentation—and Roosevelt’s unwillingness to change course once it became clear those policies weren’t working. This regime uncertainty depressed business confidence and stalled the rebound in private investment that was crucial for recovery—a point emphasized by none other than John Maynard Keynes in his correspondence with the president. Yet Roosevelt ignored Keynes’s advice. As a result, private investment remained depressed throughout his presidency.

Making matters worse, Selgin stresses, was FDR’s skepticism toward the two tools most economists today consider essential for boosting aggregate demand: deficit spending and monetary expansion. As Selgin demonstrates, Roosevelt remained firmly committed to balancing the federal budget—a pledge he had made during his 1932 campaign. As a result, much of the spending that occurred during FDR’s first term was offset by new taxes, reflecting Roosevelt’s fiscal conservatism. Indeed, throughout the New Deal era, the federal deficit remained below the peak reached under the Hoover administration and did not surpass it until the onset of World War II.

To be sure, not everything Roosevelt did hampered recovery. As Selgin acknowledges, several of FDR’s early decisions involving the banking system and the gold standard helped end the Great Contraction that had begun in 1929 and gave a much-needed boost to demand. Chief among them was the declaration of a national bank holiday shortly after his inauguration—a move Selgin regards as perhaps the single greatest achievement of Roosevelt’s first term. While FDR deserves credit for declaring the bank holiday, much of the groundwork had already been laid by the Hoover administration, making it less a New Deal innovation than a continuation of earlier efforts.

The bank holiday by itself, however, was not enough to restore public confidence in the banking system. That required convincing depositors their funds were safe. This was accomplished, in part, through the creation of federal deposit insurance. Interestingly, as Selgin explains, Roosevelt opposed deposit insurance on the grounds that it would encourage banks to behave imprudently—a concern many economists share today. In fact, FDR threatened to veto the Banking Act of 1933 specifically because of its inclusion of deposit insurance. He signed it only when it became clear that Congress would override his veto. Although Roosevelt would later claim credit for creating deposit insurance, associating it with the New Deal would be misleading.

Also crucial to the recovery was Roosevelt’s decision to devalue the dollar. During the Great Contraction, gold had flowed out of the U.S., shrinking the monetary base. Devaluation reversed this dynamic by encouraging gold inflows, which expanded the money supply and supported recovery. Yet because FDR remained wary of monetary expansion, the Federal Reserve sterilized many of these inflows, limiting their stimulative effect. Even setting aside the Fed’s response, however, devaluation could provide only a one-time boost: once international monetary equilibrium was restored, the gold inflows would stop. If monetary expansion were to continue, it would have to be fueled by a different source.

That source, as it turned out, was an unlikely one. Fearing war in Europe after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, many Europeans transferred their gold to the United States, expanding the U.S. monetary base. At the same time, rising gold prices prompted Joseph Stalin to ramp up Soviet gold production—much of it produced by forced labor in gulag-run mines. Together, these inflows significantly increased the U.S. money supply. Combined with renewed confidence in the banking system, they helped fuel a 60 percent rise in nominal spending between 1933 and 1937—an increase that, Selgin contends, accounts for most of the economic improvements during FDR’s first term. Yet here too, Roosevelt’s persistent skepticism toward monetary expansion and fear of inflation led the Federal Reserve to partially sterilize the inflows, muting their full potential effect.

So what did end the Depression?

The massive increase in government spending during World War II certainly contributed to the recovery. But as Selgin observes, if wartime spending were solely responsible, the economy should have collapsed when the war ended. Indeed, many prominent economists at the time predicted as much. Yet when government spending fell sharply after the war, the expected downturn never materialized. Instead, the economy boomed. These forecasts, Selgin argues, proved wrong because support for the kinds of New Deal interventions FDR had pursued before the war had waned. As a result, the regime uncertainty that had depressed business confidence receded, private investment returned, and the recovery finally took hold.

One of the book’s many strengths is Selgin’s evenhanded approach. This is no polemic. He readily credits the Roosevelt administration’s successes—recognizing the policies that aided recovery—and engages seriously with scholarship that challenges his account. Rather than dismiss opposing views, he addresses them directly and thoughtfully, making his case all the more persuasive for its fairness. False Dawn is a remarkable contribution that will undoubtedly stand as the authoritative account of the New Deal for years to come.

‘False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery’ by George Selgin was published in 2025 by The University of Chicago Press (ISBN: 978-0-22-683293-7) 370pp.

It has long been a fundamental maxim in business that trust and integrity are integral to the extension of credit between businesses, partners, and clients. It is a central theme of Josh Lauer’s book that, despite the revolutionary effects of technological capability, the central elements of trust and integrity remain in place. Lauer contrasts this continuity of principles with transformative changes in the fin-tech sectors, resulting in financialization of the modern American economy, the construction of individual financial identity, and customized financial products.

Lauer’s book, part of the ‘Columbia Studies in the History of U.S. Capitalism’ series, consists of nine chapters, recounting the historical evolution of systematic credit surveillance amid cumulative changes in the credit sub-sector of financial services. It is highly informative, immaculately researched, and written in crisp, precise prose. The earlier chapters are particularly insightful in explaining the transition from localized face-to-face economies to more impersonal modern financial institutions. The broader historical perspective on surveillance is identified and conceptualized, with historical parallels drawn from factory and prison surveillance, noted by Marx, Taylor, and Foucault (pages 10-11).

In earlier centuries, creditworthiness was assessed locally but as the American economy expanded, surveillance emerged as a surrogacy for personal knowledge and observation. Mercantile agencies, forerunners of credit bureaus, used advanced methodologies of reporting, surveillance, and intelligence-gathering. Creditworthiness was not primarily about wealth per se but honesty and integrity, that is, not whether you could pay but whether you would pay (pages 19-20). Evaluating and quantifying risk was always somewhat subjective, when assessing the alliterative core signifiers, or the ‘three Cs’, of character, capital, and capacity’ (page 20). Technology played a role in offsetting subjectivity, through quantitative data of balance sheets, statements, and alphanumerical coding, signifying recorded financial experience and activity (page 69).

Credit reports increased exponentially in the second half of the nineteenth century, and significantly, at the fin de siècle, two of the three leading contemporary credit bureaus were founded. ‘Credit Men’ within companies, acting as professional custodians and interpreters of creditworthiness, were organized into the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) in 1896 (page 83). While indicative of the (gendered) professionalization of credit management, after 1914, more women entered the sector and the nomenclature of the professional association was revised accordingly.

The post-1945 democratization of credit, underpinned by Mass Production, increasing availability of household goods, and installment deals, expanded the consumer base. It was accompanied by a relentless drive to educate consumers and to induce ‘Credit Consciousness’ (pages 135-136). Credit reporting networks extended across the national business landscape, strategically positioned to serve multiple sectors (page 84). Equally, a national credit infrastructure was closely aligned with the rise of department stores, with credit checks often made at point of purchase (page 87). Codes signified credit status, and authorization or refusal was conveyed within stores by pneumatic tubes. Technology again, in the form of the Dewey card-file system, vertical filing, and telephone usage, allowed for greater functionality and efficiency, not least through facilitating tighter control on credit limits.

Database marketing in the 1970s and 1980s made consumer segmentation possible, especially important given social fragmentation and rapid demographic change. Moreover, the sales potential of credit rating data had been quickly recognized, with customized information in promotional literature and correspondence. Identifying and locating income brackets and market segments became a powerful marketing tool, understood statistically through the Pareto Principle of the ‘vital few and trivial many’ (page 153). Typically, with 20% of customers providing 80% of sales, clearer financial visibility and micro-targeting of high-value and high-volume customers was possible (pages 153-154).

Computerization was transformative, not least by hastening standardization. It was a great leap forward in terms of efficiency, and decision-making was far more rapid than could be achieved by personal interviews and pneumatic tubes. Statistical scoring and ranking did have their limits, and even well into the 1960s, traditional methodologies were not fully obsolete. How character could be quantified and scored was resolved by a multi-variable approach, whereby possession of assets and commodities, such as a mortgage, a home phone, and a savings or checking account, provided a profile of creditworthiness based on personal stability and institutional validation (page 206). Affirmative and negative reporting of lifestyle, employment, income, and health, were bell-weathers of creditworthiness. Adjustable and variable interest rates followed the risk-based pricing model of the insurance sector but as the sub-prime crisis in the Federal home-loan markets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac indicated, the temptation for lenders was to relax credit limits. (page 209-210).

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, credit data played a vital role in the interstices of the State apparatus and criminal justice system. Yet, issues surrounding data-sharing and confidentiality became more contentious, and fittingly, privacy, data collection, and regulation dominate the second half of the book. Historically, the credit sector developed without close legislative scrutiny, but self-regulation was increasingly untenable. A raft of legislation, such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970, following the 1968 Consumer Credit Protection Act, including Truth in Lending clauses, provided powers of oversight, transparency, and accountability (page 226). There were societal welfare gains from a more efficient credit system but the trade-off was greater surveillance and data mining to inform credit decisions and to act as a marketing tool (page 234).

While credit bureaus sought to act as neutral information-gatherers, credit availability could not escape the broader socio-economic framework of modern America, with race, gender, class, occupational status, and residence all profiling factors (page 143). There were winners and losers. Single women and minorities were often excluded from mainstream credit and exposed to predatory lending. This ‘credit discrimination’ was tackled by Equal Credit Opportunity Acts (ECOA) in the 1970s, prohibiting credit refusal on the basis of gender or race, and promoting ‘blind’ scoring to eliminate discrimination (pages 235-236). Yet, financial identity based on economic stability and institutional status often still reflected entrenched racial and gender disadvantages. Statistical credit scoring can’t eliminate proxy discrimination since it deals with the effects rather than causes of disadvantage and discrimination (pages 237-238).

More positively, greater efficiency was driven by risk modelling and database marketing, with powerful information systems generating predictive data for different types of lenders (page 249). Crucially, electronic data is not containable in the same way as paper, thus privacy concerns are again viably raised. The practice of financial institutions, outside the purview of the FCRA, continuing to share financial information with affiliates and third parties in joint marketing activities, is a particularly egregious example (pages 263-264). The oligopolistic triumvirate of Equifax, TRW, and TransUnion may be able to use their market power to regulate the spread of information, but the credit landscape will not regress to an earlier iteration. From a process of localized character assessment to national FICO scores, creditworthiness remains central to an economy largely built on corporate, household, and individual debt. Identifying potential defaulters and extracting more profitability from ‘good’ borrowers remains central to creditors.

Indeed, that dichotomy portrayed by Lauer between the efficiency and functionality of the credit sector, and an increasingly intrusive surveillance apparatus, is convincingly validated by an impressive body of research. In many ways, the book is another thoughtful testimony to the disruptive effects of modern technology, and how there are positive and negative effects of innovation and expansion. Credit bureau databases were predictably an early target for hackers, but ironically a large volume of data is now provided by consumers themselves on social media, through declared data. Surprisingly, until fairly recently, there appeared to be little opposition to credit surveillance, but now, the mantra ‘All data is credit data’ resonates widely (page 267).

It may have been useful to have drawn an international comparison to test American exceptionalism, by assessing the creation of national markets through mass production, product uniformity, and standardization in less commercial societies. As Adam Smith famously wrote: ‘The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market’. Certainly, the expansion of the credit sector is part of that larger narrative of national markets and institutions eclipsing local economies, institutions, and relationships. In that sense, the development of the sector is indicative of a thriving capitalist economy.

Lauer arrives at a somewhat ominous conclusion as to technology, in stating: ‘No digital presence goes untracked; no digital profile goes unmined. This is by design’ (page 274). While algorithms facilitate high-level micro-targeting, and thus further erode human interaction, AI threatens to go further, most notably through automated screening in multiple contexts. The positive features of financialization and financial identity have clearly come at a cost to individual privacy. Avoiding further quasi-Orwellian intrusion may now depend, somewhat ironically, on robust government regulation and oversight.

‘Creditworthy: A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America’ by Josh Lauer was published in 2024 by Columbia University Press (ISBN: 978-0-23-121663-0). 352pp.)

 

Gordon Bannerman is a professor teaching Business History at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph-Humber, Ontario. His primary research interests focus on modern British political and economic history.

In a world where academic publications often descend into the microscopic world of nuance, there is a detectable trend towards volumes with the laudable objective of providing the aspiring amateur with an introductory overview of a subject. The author of Profit has undoubtedly taken this path and pitched for the macro-view: we find ultimately that that the intention of the book is to trace ‘the environmental aspects of capitalism’s germination and growth through human history’ (page 253).

We’re inducted into the argument via the ubiquitous ‘palm-sized technological marvel’ which is simultaneously the ‘environmental crime that is the Smartphone’ (page 2). At the outset, Stoll proposes to resolve this paradox by allowing the reader to judge where responsibility lies between humanity or that subset of guilty humans comprising the ‘capitalists and corporations’ who define the ‘Capitalocene’ (page 3). The verdict turns upon what the author calls ‘profit’. However, while from the outset it is clear that ‘profit’ is not to be equated with a synonym for capitalism, no more precise explanation is forthcoming and in that void, greater experience with the text encourages the reader towards a tentative definition of ‘cui bono?’.

Arranged in chronological order from the dawn of humanity, each chapter seeks to illustrate (if not fully illuminate) typical characteristics of the relationship between human activity driven by ‘profit’ and the natural resources involved. The deliberate choice to define ‘profit’ ambiguously ensures that any – indeed all – human activity becomes material for this study. While this may in itself appear ambitious, the decision to cover the entirety of human existence, from the first dawn of the Hominim, cannot help but have an echo of Shakespeare’s ‘vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’. To navigate this scope would seem to necessitate a rigorous approach with a solid ‘backbone’ argument across the work upon which can hang the various elements of the narrative. Instead, the author has chosen to use a join-the-dots approach supported by potted biographies of a handful of individuals or publications which are used across the ages in a manner similar to posts carrying a string of lamps.

The opening chapter covers the first few hundred thousand years of Hominim activity and is naturally lacking in data points. Stoll runs this period of study up to the fifteenth century AD/CE; when the second chapter switches the focus to ‘Trade and Empire’. This division is a missed opportunity to explore the substantial trading empires of Greece and Rome; instead, with Columbus as the locus for the second period of study this enables the introduction of ‘America’, but brings in its wake an atypical focus on the development of the Genoese Republic, which is subsequently proposed as an exemplar. Chapter Three concerns ‘Coal and Machines’ – although first through the experience of the fifteenth century Dutch, introducing the first of many (ultimately disconcerting) chronological hops back and forth, and odd since the author suggests a reliance of the Dutch empire on wind-power, before moving onto the English, ‘Plantation Capitalism’, sugar and (unusually, perhaps) the contributions of the Scottish Presbyterians who, we are informed, ‘disproportionally administered the British Empire … and dominated shipping and trade’ (page 71). Chapter Four is formed around ‘Steam and Steel’, which acts as the bridge to introduce Andrew Carnegie, whose early life coincided with the Bessemer Process, but more fortuitously was of Scottish decent, which facilitated his career in an age of imperialism and industrial capitalism, soon to become a global phenomenon.

Chapter Five adds environmentalism to the narrative – in the last half of the nineteenth century and exactly halfway through the work. The topic is introduced through two works which Stoll considers pivotal: George Marsh’s Man and Nature and William Jevons’ The Coal Question. Stoll makes the claim that these are ‘books that shook the confidence of a complacent public’ (page116), which appears bold given their subsequent descent into obscurity – almost immediately, in Jevons’ case. While Marsh did later privately republish his text under a fresh title, neither of these prolific authors considered their topic of sufficient importance to engage with it again, and indeed the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy manages to devote over six thousand words to Jevons without a mention of his pamphlet.

The focus moves through the twentieth century on the back of what Stoll terms ‘consumer capitalism’ – the origins of which are ascribed to (consecutively) the availability of mass finance, petroleum, electricity, plastic, disposable products and finally, advertising. Although this caused an increase in ‘waste’ and had a brief pause in the United States (the Wall Street crash, here described as a product of capitalism rather than speculation), this continues through the twentieth century (global conflicts are not discussed) until the rise of the bright and buoyant era known to historians as the Cold War, in which the motor car and electronics drove postwar prosperity hand in hand with central ‘government activism’, until this was attacked by ‘alarmed … wealthy corporate leaders’ who created ‘a propaganda network to promote weak government and low taxes’ (page 176).

Post-1970, the narrative in the chapter ‘Selling Everything’ leaps to hyper-market operations – exampled by Walmart and the web giant Amazon – both of which enjoyed unique success and so would be candidates for the atypical rather than the representative. Their success is set against the stagnation and decline in the US economy, a claim illuminated by the notion that more people entered the service sector in the eight years from 1973 to 1981 than the auto and steel industries combined. However, the author had already flagged the death of nineteenth century ‘industrial capitalism’ before the Second World War, so the shift towards ‘consumer capitalism’ would seem to be entirely in line with expectations, given the central notion of this volume that all and any economic activity is ‘capitalism’. Once again, a handful examples from across the globe are collated to suggest negative consequences from various categories of causes – coal and petroleum are singled out, which seems odd since coal would have presumably featured in the ‘industrial capitalist’ period (however ill-defined) – rather than that of the consumer or late consumer capitalist periods.

It is only at the end of Chapter Eight that we finally begin to see an attempt to discuss ‘Pollution, Air and Climate’; CFCs, Ozone depletion, permafrost methane, and oceanic acidification are introduced and concluded in rather less than one page (pages 223-224).

The last chapter is devoted to the formation of the Global Environmental movement, again through exploring the impact of two publications. The first, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, is widely acknowledged as perhaps the most important environmental book of the twentieth century. The second, Only One Earth, is Barbara Ward’s influential contribution to sustainable development; both Carson’s lapsed Reformed Protestant heritage and Ward’s hybrid Quaker-Catholicism are given an airing: notwithstanding these volumes remain edifying to all readers. A summary of American developments post-World War II is joined to the rise of the West German Green Party in the 197Os, and the impact of the Seveso, Bhopal and Chernobyl accidents in contributing to a wider spread of environmental concern and the European rise of support for anti-nuclear groups. Half of the very short summary of the ‘Rise of the Greens’ is once again devoted to the influence of a (northern, Reformed) Protestant heritage, while in Catholic countries environmentalism becomes a ‘non-religious, non-moralistic environmental movement’ (page 239): some examples would help forward this claim, not least as it is contradicted by Stoll’s conclusion that in 2015 (and more than forty years after publication) Ward’s work influenced the pronouncements of Pope Francis (page 241).

Stoll’s concluding chapter states that the key question is: ‘does it profit us when someone else makes a profit?’ (page 251). He suggests – perhaps unsurprisingly – that the answer is unclear. However, what is missing here – as in the entire work – is a decomposition of what is meant by the question. Instead, what is presented – as in the entire work – merely adds fog to the lens. Stoll makes the claim that ‘in the pre-Modern Christian West profit entailed a moral calculus’ (page 251). This is both bold and belated: if the purpose of Profit was intended to be an exploration of this theme, it would have gained some coherence – but would have lost any right to be considered ‘An Environmental History’.

Stoll’s summary conclusion is disappointingly (but perhaps not surprisingly) a mirror of the introduction: capitalism (whatever the form in which it is labelled) is rooted in human nature, and the outcomes – including ‘profit’ – have always (historically) been realised ‘at nature’s expense’ (page 252). After 250 pages, the author’s final warning is both stark and something of a surprise: ‘we stop the machinery of consumer capitalism at our peril’ (page 254). Hope is at hand, however, evidenced by an increasing appetite for ‘experiences’ rather than ‘stuff’, with the implication that cruises, travel to foreign countries, climbing mountains, and diving coral reefs will prove less of an environmental issue. There is even a thumbs up for games on Smartphones. It is unfortunate that at the last, the focus falls entirely upon the consumption habits not of the globe, but on one segment of the American population.

Almost inevitably the overall tone of the work feels rushed – indeed superficial. Arguments do not have the space to be outlined, let alone developed, and thus the whistle-stop tour becomes a giddy and frustrating experience. Indeed, the major weakness arises from the absence of any sustained, central argument. Instead, often poorly constructed polemic is substituted. Possibly the strangest statement occurs in the conclusion, where the reader is invited to contemplate how very different ‘Modern consumer capitalism’ might have been ‘had the Genoese prevailed at the War of Chioggia’ (page 252): it is not easy to imagine a reversal of historic events which would have made less of a ripple beyond the late fourteenth century Adriatic. In the haste to apply the broad brush, some odd images appear: the period noted by historians for its tranquillity and known as the Belle Epoque is described as ‘the tumultuous era between the 1880s and the mid-1910s’ (page 137).

The stated focus on Western Europe and the United States of America is inconsistent. Many examples are typical of the USA but not Europe, while China and Lake Nasser are the examples chosen to illustrate the possible negative effects of a building dams – irrespective of the atypical nature of both Chinese construction techniques, the Sahara sun and the relationship between Egypt and the Nile (page191).

Another oddity is the frequent intrusion of a religious (specifically Christian Presbyterian) theme. Many of the individuals featured are sprinkled with a reference to a ‘Puritan heritage which shaped their analysis and solutions’, even if the author immediately acknowledges that (as in the case of Jevons) he ‘neither embraced nor disavowed the religion of his forefathers’ or the ‘quite religious’ Marsh ‘who rarely attended’ (page 121). As Dr Stoll has previous published a book entitled Protestantism, Capitalism and Nature in America this may perhaps be inevitable, but it is ultimately regrettable since a more general discussion of the nature of profit fragmented through the lens of world religions – or even that of Christianity through the ages – is entirely missing.

Perhaps more importantly for ‘An Environmental History’, there is also very little history of the environment – rather, a small list of negative consequences of human existence are regularly recycled (forests denuded, rivers silted, air polluted) as the consequences of a wide range of activities. While the telegraph, mining, smelting, manufacturing, shipbuilding and consumerism are singled out for particular approbation at various points, the conclusions are largely homogenous: mining makes as mess; processing (from refining sugar to forging metal) burns wood; some people in various places used slave or indentured labour, while others traded or purchased the outputs, and both sea and air quality have got worse as both populations and the reach of advertising have grown.

However unremarkable these conclusions, it may be that there exists an audience for whom it needs re-stating. Given the almost hubristic scope and ambition, to note a lack of supporting data might appear to miss the point. But while the book scatters dates in profusion, there are no data points at all, nor graphs nor tables to illustrate any point. The illustrations are therefore all not only biographical but somewhat anecdotal, while the photograph illustrating Brazilians waving placards including ‘Pray for Amazon’ (page 241) sits somewhat uncomfortably with the earlier profile of Jeff Bezos.

Curiously, the author always falls short of a polemic against capitalism – and in the absence of supporting data it is hard to come to any other conclusion. The central, if missing, element in this work was fully identified in Ward’s work – engagement with the question: what is the mechanism by which we balance the (inner) individual’s right to an adequate standard of living with the (outer) limit of what the Earth can sustain?

An experienced academic editor was wont to point out to aspiring authors that it is ‘always easier to write a book than a paper’. The message was that, while structure – founded on a clear purpose and supported by evidenced argument – remains essential to both, the longer format can withstand a greater burden. Dr Stoll would appear not to have received this advice, and while possibly a good man with good intentions, unfortunately ‘An Environmental History’ was never a very good idea, and it has not resulted in a good book.

‘Profit: An Environmental History’ by Mark Stoll was published in 2024 by Polity (ISBN 978-1-50-953324-4). 280pp.

 

Dr Andrew Fincham is an early-modern socio-economic historian affiliated to Woodbrooke College, University of Birmingham, UK. His research is concerned with understanding the links between religious values, ethical business, and commercial success; and the implications for responsible corporate governance. His current areas of interest include a revision of Quaker historiography and an exploration of the underlying issues in Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

It takes a brave person to challenge one of the consensus beliefs of a society, but that is precisely what Erik Baker does in, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America. His book puts firmly in its sights ‘the idea that everyone should strive to be entrepreneurial’ which he promotes to the status of a ‘work ethic’ that ‘promises material rewards and intangible benefits’ but drives a ‘spike in burnout and despair’ and an ‘epidemic of exhaustion’ (page 3). The book gives a grand historic sweep of corporate America from Henry Ford’s adoption of the ‘New Thought’ Movement in the 1920s to the ‘Great Resignation’ of the 2020s.

At each stage on this industrial timeline the thought-provoking question is how entrepreneurial strategies and activities bred an entrepreneurial work ethic which became so embedded that it was adopted as assumed wisdom for all, rather than the choice of a few. His issue isn’t with entrepreneurs but with ‘our collective commitment to entrepreneurialism’ which he suggests isn’t helping because ‘it enjoins us to work more intensely than we need to and leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work, or the right kind of work, to do’ (page 3). But I couldn’t help replying, ‘Really?’ Is the core proposition proven that entrepreneurial work and making your own job leads to an innate drivenness and risks profound emptiness not experienced by those who work in corporate structures? This doesn’t take away from the fascinating content but does add a warning label that the historical overview needs processing and applying.

One strength in the book is the rich historical detail that deconstructs the beliefs of industrialists, politicians and thought leaders and shows how strong an influence they have had on our attitude to doing work we love – a phrase that is common on co-working walls but is attributed to Elizabeth Jones Towne in the 1900s with phrases such as ‘A man’s success is measured…by the amount of LOVE he feeds his work with’ (page 33). What the book left me wondering however was what other work ethics were at play and how they also impacted our view of entrepreneurial endeavour. Puritan New England is mentioned as an ethic that denied ‘desire and selfhood’ (page 33) but is quickly dismissed as a ‘baleful, anachronistic influence’ in contrast to the success-orientated New Thought luminaries, such as Towne (page 33). If religion is referenced at all it is in a thread throughout the book which separates the new mechanical ideas of business efficiency from the ‘extra endowment’ of ‘foresight – the philosophic power of understanding the complex flux of the varieties of human societies’ (page 56). The idea of a ‘divine energy’ which ‘releases in man a power and a force beyond human capacity to generate’ (page 87) was made popular by Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952. The glaring gap is the teaching from religion about the purpose of work as a gift from God and part of his eternal purposes. If work is about channelling our own energies, then it is not surprising that we will get exhausted. But when we work with all God’s energy working powerfully in and through us (Philippians 2:13), then we will be restored and enjoy meaningful work and Sabbath rest!

The book is a detailed survey from an almost exclusively USA perspective. This shouldn’t be surprising as the title gives due warning of which side of the pond it’s placed, but it did mean that some transatlantic translation is necessary. The experience of the Blitz and ‘labour’s not working’ election posters are just two amongst many British cultural moments that shape our attitude to work and entrepreneurship. The description of Sun Belt entrepreneurs as a ‘Promethean master race’ full of ‘good-looking, healthy, superior Americans’ (page 114) is slightly at odds with the picture of people in 1960s Britain – the creative energy was there but it looked very different and shaped an entrepreneurial work ethic very differently. By its nature, the book focuses on some aspects of corporate America which help tell the story of an entrepreneurial work ethic, but I’m sure many other threads to that story could be added. One striking insight is how much influence Harvard Business School had in shaping the corporate mindset and several professors are frequently quoted. Since the author is a lecturer at Harvard it is less unexpected but still noteworthy, especially as the influence from and on academic institutions is in a liminal phase right now.

The later chapters describe the entrepreneurial philosophy of Steve Jobs and the rise of ‘philosopher-kings’ (page 163) who thought very differently from the academics in the elite east coast business schools. In contrast to the accepted wisdom, Steve Jobs focused on the intersection of the arts and the sciences, and the conservative executives of middle America emphasised ‘the analogy between the entrepreneurial firm and the patriarchal family; the entrepreneurial leader as a paternal authority; the entrepreneurial work ethic as an expression of faith in God and country’ (page 164). The contrast in the ways the power of entrepreneurialism is applied in the lecture halls of Harvard, the Silicon Valley offices of Apple and the training institutions set up by business leaders in St Louis, is a helpful reminder of how people shape very similar ideas with very different worldviews.

As our narrative timeline propels towards the present there is a fascinating focus on social entrepreneurship – a current phenomenon well worth studying in its historical context. If the outworking of the entrepreneurial spirit’s drive is exhaustion and the enforcing of ‘unforced enthusiasm’ amongst those who ‘survived the cut’, are in ‘the winners circle’ and working ‘extreme jobs’ (page 189), there is a useful exploration of how gain of other types of value legitimises entrepreneurial purpose. One conclusion, which I’m a big proponent of and is the focus of my research, is to reevaluate what we mean by value and what we are therefore applying our entrepreneurial energies to generating. But the conclusion that seems more favoured here is that it is inevitable to create ‘duds of the new economy’ as ‘a significant fraction of the population was condemned to be economically valueless’ (page 231) while the elite are just plain exhausted.

The ongoing tension is in the starting hypothesis. If the entrepreneurial work ethic is causing exhaustion because it ‘leaves us feeling devoid of purpose when we don’t have work, or the right kind of work, to do’ (page 3) what alternative would give meaning and renewing energy? The answer, which many theologians not mentioned in this book have suggested over the centuries, is to find purpose in serving an entrepreneurial God who is creative, redemptive and holistically entrepreneurial.

Would I recommend this book? Yes, to a specific audience who have interest in the story of entrepreneurship or to an engaged audience who are willing to apply the history from a land far away, and in some parts a time long ago, to the present challenges of work. Don’t expect ready answers to exhaustion, but do explore the many reasons in the history of corporate America why doing what we love has become the new religion at work.

‘Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America’ by Erik Baker was published in 2025 by Harvard University Press (ISBN: 978-0-67-429360-1). 337pp.

Andrew Baughen is a management consultant specialising in mapping the whole value of organisations. He researches business worldviews and teaches ethics at Bayes Business School and is also an associate minister at St Margaret’s Lothbury.

Paul Sagar’s Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics offers an ambitious reinterpretation of Adam Smith’s intellectual legacy. The book challenges prevailing accounts of Smith’s political and economic philosophy, particularly the assumption that Smith harbored fundamental anxieties about market-driven societies. Instead, Sagar argues that Smith’s concerns lay less in moral corruption and more in the political dangers posed by commercial societies. The book is an essential contribution to modern debates on Smith, offering a historically grounded yet philosophically nuanced perspective.

Sagar organizes his study into five chapters, each tackling a specific dimension of Smith’s political thought.

Sagar begins by dissecting what he terms the ‘standard model’ of Smith scholarship. He critiques the widespread belief that Smith’s four stages theory constitutes a form of conjectural history. Instead, he argues that Smith used it as an economic model rather than a predictive framework for historical development (page 20). Sagar contends that many commentators have wrongly assumed that Smith believed in a linear progression of societies towards commercialism.

The second chapter examines Smith’s conception of liberty, moving beyond the standard republican interpretation. Sagar argues that Smith’s understanding of liberty aligns more closely with the notion of nondomination, derived from historical conditions rather than abstract philosophical principles (page 72). He differentiates Smith’s stance from contemporary republican theorists such as Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit, suggesting that Smith saw the rule of law—not civic virtue—as the key mechanism for securing liberty (page 85).

One of the book’s most provocative arguments emerges in its analysis of Smith’s engagement with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Many scholars have framed Smith as a measured respondent to Rousseau’s critique of commercial society. Sagar refutes this reading, arguing that Smith did not take Rousseau seriously as a thinker (page 120). Instead, Smith viewed Rousseau’s critique as intellectually weak, failing to engage with the empirical realities of history (page 138). This (third) chapter challenges long-standing interpretations that place Smith and Rousseau in dialectical opposition.

A key theme in Smithian scholarship is the question of moral corruption in commercial societies. In the fourth chapter, Sagar maintains that modern interpreters have overstated Smith’s concerns in this area. Rather than viewing commerce as inherently corrupting, Smith saw political mismanagement—particularly the alignment of economic power with political authority—as the real danger (page 165). Sagar carefully distinguishes between Smith’s concerns about elite behavior and a broader critique of commerce itself.

The final chapter turns to Smith’s famous critique of mercantilism and the influence of economic elites on government. Sagar frames Smith as a realist who understood the dangers of concentrated economic power but did not believe in an idealized republican counterforce (page 195). He argues that Smith’s Wealth of Nations should be read not as an economic libertarian manifesto, but as a work deeply preoccupied with the balance of power in political institutions.

Sagar’s reinterpretation of Smith is both refreshing and polemical. His main achievement is dismantling the Adam Smith Problem, the idea that Smith’s moral philosophy (in The Theory of Moral Sentiments) is fundamentally at odds with his economic thought (The Wealth of Nations). Sagar demonstrates that this supposed contradiction rests on a misunderstanding of Smith’s intellectual project. Smith was not torn between benevolence and self-interest; rather, he was developing a holistic view of social order where markets played an integral but politically contingent role (page 210).

One of the book’s strengths is its methodological rigor. Sagar carefully contextualizes Smith’s thought within the Scottish Enlightenment, drawing on sources that extend beyond standard economic interpretations. His engagement with historiography is particularly commendable—by distinguishing between historical reality and theoretical models, he clarifies many misconceptions about Smith’s views on commercial society.

However, the book is not without its weaknesses. Sagar occasionally overstates his case, particularly in downplaying Smith’s engagement with Rousseau. While it is true that Smith critiqued Rousseau’s speculative method, dismissing the Discourse on Inequality as intellectually weak (page 138), Sagar overlooks Rousseau’s influence on debates surrounding virtue, luxury, and civic participation. A more balanced account might acknowledge that, even if Smith rejected Rousseau’s conclusions, he still saw them as worth engaging with.

Additionally, while Sagar’s challenge to the standard model is compelling, he does not always fully explore its implications. If Smith was not concerned with moral corruption per se, but rather with political distortions of economic power, what does this mean for contemporary readings of his work? Does it suggest that Smith should be seen as a forerunner of institutional economics rather than classical liberalism? Sagar hints at these questions but does not fully develop them.

Despite these minor critiques, Adam Smith Reconsidered is an important work that forces scholars to rethink long-standing assumptions about Smith’s political philosophy. It challenges received wisdom with meticulous scholarship and clear argumentation. While some of its claims will spark debate—particularly regarding Smith’s engagement with Rousseau and his views on commercial morality—the book succeeds in shifting the terms of discussion.

For those interested in political economy, intellectual history, or the philosophical foundations of modern capitalism, Adam Smith Reconsidered is an essential read. It reaffirms Smith’s place not as a narrow economist, but as a sophisticated political thinker whose insights remain relevant for today.

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‘Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics’ by Paul Sagar was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press (ISBN 978-0-69-123494-6). 248pp.

Jan C. Bentz is a lecturer and tutor at Blackfriars in Oxford, with interests in how medieval metaphysics shaped modern thought. He also works as a freelance journalist.

We have witnessed thirty years of neo-liberal triumphalism. Essential services have been privatised, and utilities have been sold off, while the state has seldom been so weak, and, as a result, work has become more precarious, inequality has widened to unacceptable levels, and a super-elite of mega-rich plutocrats has been allowed to grow wealthier and wealthier at everyone else’s expense. The liberal-left has so successfully established this prevailing narrative about what is wrong with modern capitalism, and how only a stronger state can fix it, that even many of its natural opponents buy into much of its analysis. Ruchir Sharma’s analysis, however, is here to make a simple point. They are completely wrong. Modern capitalism is indeed in bad shape, he argues. But not because the state is too small, but because it is too big.

What Went Wrong With Capitalism tells a powerful story about how the system of making and selling stuff has changed dramatically over the last fifty years. In Sharma’s view, the conventional wisdom is that the state grew slightly in the immediate post-war period, but its size was dramatically rolled back during the Reagan and Thatcher era, and ever since then has shrunk in size and influence. ‘Millennials, the next ruling generation, have embraced a narrative that is clear on the problems of capitalism and way too certain of the causes,’ he writes. ‘Like the media establishment, many Americans seem to assume that the story of shrinking government is true [and] if these distortions arose in a period of shrinking government, they figure, then bigger government must be the answer. But if the era of shrinking government never happened, that is exactly the wrong answer.’

Sharma brilliantly sets out the stark facts and figures on the ever expanding role of government in the modern economy. While Reagan and Thatcher were preaching the virtues of liberal, small government, low-taxes and free markets, central bankers were moving steadily in the other direction. The rot started with the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, ironically a devotee of the extreme liberal Ayn Rand, who started propping up the financial markets with cheaper money every time they fell a little. Ever since then, central bankers saw it as their job to tame and manage the business cycle. First interest rates were cut too close to zero, and then they started printing money on an extravagant scale, and that allowed governments to borrow to finance deficits on a scale that used to be impossible. As Sharma points out, in America potential Presidents used to pay at least lip service to balancing the books, and Bill Clinton actually managed it in one year, the last occupant of the White House to do so. Now they no longer even bother to mention it, so that by 2024, with a deficit of 6pc of GDP in a strong economy, until recently an unthinkable sum outside of wartime, the candidates compete with one another on how much more they can borrow and spend.

But it is not just debt of course. The state has been intervening more and more directly in the economy as well. In the US, Sharma points out the Code of Federal Regulations was first updated annually in the early 1960s, and has grown more than eight-fold since then, and now runs to 180,000 pages covering 240 volumes. America turned into ‘a nation of lawyers’ he argues, not because its people are naturally litigious, as is sometimes lazily assumed, but because it was the only way to cope with the often bewildering accumulation of extra rules that businesses have to follow. In Europe, it is even worse. Sharma brilliantly nails the myth of a ‘neo-liberal’ European Union, pointing out that all it has done is replace cumbersome national regulations with even more cumbersome versions designed in Brussels. ‘In part because the European Union lacks the power to tax and spend directly, its energies have been directed instead into what scholar Giandomenico Majone called “an almost pure regulatory state”, which by the late nineties was issuing regulations at an almost exponential pace.’ On both sides of the Atlantic, the story is the same, with governments attempting to micro-manage almost every aspect of commercial life. Both the Covid pandemic and now the drive to hit Net Zero targets have massively accelerated that.

The strength of the book is in its forensic use of facts to puncture left-liberal myths, and to chart the increasing role of government in our lives. For example, the number of lawyers in the US was growing by only 30,000 per decade prior to 1970, but increased to 100,000 every ten years after the tide of federal regulation grew and grew. Likewise, the number of lobbyists in Washington has overtaken the number of federal employees, with companies spending vast sums trying to manipulate the law in their favour. Almost every page contains a fresh nugget of data, each one illustrating how much more powerful the state has become. Add it all up, and Sharma paints a devastatingly accurate portrait of how massively the state has grown in size and power over the last thirty years, and more importantly, how that has slowed down the innovation and growth that were vital to a stable, free and prosperous society.

If it has a flaw, it is that the book is weaker on remedies. Sharma identifies Switzerland, Taiwan and, perhaps controversially, Vietnam as the three examples of states that have managed to get it right. They are good choices. The trouble is, voters in all the major democracies keep voting for leaders who promise to intervene more, spend more, and regulate more: Argentina is the only country in recent times to vote for less government. The hard part is to convince the voters that the state should get out of their lives, and while Sharma will convince his readers of the case, he has little to say about how to turn that into a message with mass appeal. Even so, it is an excellent book, timely and well-argued, and essential reading for anyone who wants a refreshing corrective to the prevailing wisdom.

‘What Went Wrong With Capitalism’ by Ruchir Sharma was published in 2024 by Penguin (ISBN: 978-0-24-159576-3). 384pp.

Matthew Lynn is an author, journalist and entrepreneur. He writes for The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and Money Week, is the author of the Death Force thrillers, and is the founder of Lume Books. 

As is perhaps indicated by its title, this is an ambitious book. The author proposes a ‘History of the Rich’ over two continents across a period that just falls short of a millennium. The context for this attempt is set amongst our contemporary western society’s ‘ever growing’ obsession with discussing both the super-rich and celebrity – a phenomenon which is contrasted with that of the Middle Ages, where ‘the rich were required not to appear to be wealthy’ in pursuit of ‘the correct functioning of a perfect (Christian) society and its institutions, especially the political ones.’ (page 1).

The structure selected by the author is tripartite: the first is conceptual, setting out the multiple and daunting issues arising from definitions, demography and data more generally, and an overview derived from the available historical sources – such sources as have given rise to the geographic locus of the study. The second sets out a triform model of ‘Paths to Affluence’; the routes offered are ‘nobility and aristocracy’, ‘innovation and technology’, or ‘finance’; these three are combined to enable a review of ‘saving and consumption habits’ over the period; and a concluding summary is offered, focused largely on the post-1900 period. The third and final part considers various perceptions of ‘The Rich in Society’, including wealth as a ‘social problem’, the role of patronage and philanthropy, ‘Super-Rich and Politics’, and finally a sweeping illustration of ‘The Rich in Times of Crisis from the Black Death to COVID-19’. A four-page summary concludes the volume.

This approach raises both some questions and a number of quite daunting challenges. The structure presents a history rooted in a survey of (available) evidence, giving rise to a triple-twisted trunk through which riches are amassed and from which various branches spread out, each hoping to bear distinctive fruit in the form of key aspects of ‘the rich’ across eight centuries. The very first question which strikes the historian (particularly a socio-economic historian) is whether that evidence can support such a structure. The bare minimum for such an attempt would have to include useable data sets on both individual ‘riches’ and the overall ‘riches’ of the society or nation in which the individual acted, and accurate estimates of the population of that society. Ideally this would be comparable across multiple societies both within the geographical area of the study and over the period under study. Not one of these necessary conditions prevails. While the very short sub-chapter on historical sources acknowledges the multiplicity of ‘intrinsic difficulties’ (page 32), it is not until Part 2 that the reader is presented with the broad trajectory of the evidential base (page 40) which reveals a scarcity of data points amounting to a dearth. The kingdoms selected are England, ‘Germany’, Naples, Venice, and the Sabaudian States, across which less than twenty data points are dotted in over various dates from 1300 to 1800; this is repeated for both an estimated 5% and 1% of the respective populations. Yet historians lack accurate sources to create population totals: England may be one of the better served with the unique Domesday Book profiles of community wealth in 1086, but there was no further attempt at a national census for over seven hundred years, until 1801. But the challenge of societal population estimates of early modern societies pales into insignificance against that of estimating the wealth of their communities – the datum essential to understanding the allocation of that wealth in a discrete percentile distribution. As every historical demographer knows, our understanding of populations across geographies over time is shaky at best; Peter Lindhart has been quoted as suggesting that recent studies on early modern England allow us to offer ‘to replace [Gregory] King’s old rough tentative guesses with new rough tentative guesses’.[1]

In the absence of accurate evidence to assess individual wealth, societal wealth or population size, the prevalence of percentages quoted to illustrate the argument are unconvincing at best, while the fractions of a decimal are superfluous. While sources are given (page 321), the absence of data tables and the acknowledged deployment of shifting definitions are problematic: wealth and affluence, ‘the rich’ and ‘the super-rich’ are used interchangeably; estimates are based upon individual wealth, familial wealth, property tax-derived estimates and moveable wealth submissions and more; with an assumption that each possesses sufficient equivalence to enable the arguments to proceed. The author attempts to reassure that ‘dishomogeneity [sic] in the data is dictated by the sources and a well-known feature of many comparative studies of wealth distribution’ (page 33); while this may inevitably be the case, it fails to dispel the shadow of unease under which the cautious reader proceeds.

Leaving to one side the unsurmountable challenges presented by the statistics, the principal line of argument deserves attention. The trichotomy of wealth originating in aristocracy, innovation or finance would appear to diminish the essential contributions of the monopolistic mercantilism which characterised the international commerce which brought many individuals into both the first and third categories. The role of the western Christian Church (significantly Catholic for the first half of the survey, arguably equally Protestant towards the later part) is also strangely sidelined. The author claims that Scholastics taught wealth was a sin: yet in the principal work cited, Aquinas follows Augustine (indeed, Abelard) in carefully adopting a largely intentionalist ethic in which the motivation of the accumulation of wealth is all important.[2] Certainly the Church was widely regarded during the vast majority of this period as a repository of wealth: the Fraticelli were declared heretics in 1296 because their vows of poverty stood contrary to the Church’s central role in banking, while England’s Henry VIII’s famous dissolution was in principle no different from Louis VII’s instruction to French regent Abbot Sugar for funding for his Second Crusade: ’sive de nostro seu de vestro pecuniam sumptam nobis mittatis’![3]

Such a morally neutral conception of wealth is not shared by the author, who states at the outset that with regard to inherited wealth ‘…fiscal systems could, and probably should, have a role in ensuring an acceptably even playing field’ (page 5). Indeed, this represents the recurring theme of the volume: that the unarguably persistent inequality of wealth distribution (be it never so accurately measured) should be redressed as a primary objective of social governance. And while it is clearly a weakness that the claim that such inequality has only worsened over time (the evidence supports a theory that it fluctuates), this central belief is worthy of consideration. It is therefore important that quantitatively the most significant factor in social demographics over the period is almost totally sidelined: that of the growth in population. It is stated that one of the very few drivers of an increase in equality over the last millennium was the Black Death, which some have estimated wiped out half the population of Europe (perhaps some fifty million people); however accurate this may be, the explanation that subsequent wealth inequality was addressed by an increase in real wages would seem to ignore the basic fact that there was more to go around fewer individuals. The reader is invited (page 59) to ‘imagine a cake that shrinks in size, while the number of exceptionally hungry guests at the party continually increases – soon the other partygoers will get only crumbs’: one could also imagine a cake that remains unchanged, while the number of guests halves. The absence of analysis on this point, and the preference for pursuing other avenues, is a missed opportunity. Demographic historians would prefer to examine an explanation of inequality which accounts for the effect of a European population which increased by some eight million each century from 1200CE to 1700CE, but then added fifty million people by 1800 and a further two hundred and fifty million by 2000CE.

The fruits of this tree as presented in each of the chapters and sub chapters are beyond the scope of a review; however, a determined preference to outline a selection of justifications for fiscal implications is characteristic of the latter half of the volume. Indeed, ‘It’s Taxes or Pitchforks’ could well have served as a sub-title and not merely as a quotation confined to the conclusion. What is rather less obvious is that ‘all the historical the evidence…[supports the proposition that] the position of the rich in western societies is intrinsically fragile” (page 317). In the face of their continuity displayed over the last millennium (not to mention those preceding) this would seem a curious statement, and using a definition of ‘rich’ deployed in the preceding chapters (that of income twice the median) one that is empirically somewhat awkward to sustain.

Ultimately, the historian is forced to consider themselves somewhat disappointed – instead of a history, we have content which is substantially a series of essays reflecting upon the author’s selection of aspects of ‘richness’, considered over discrete epochs. A taxonomy setting out a variety of attitudes towards richness could have been simultaneously less ambitious and far simpler to evidence, even if conclusions were as speculative as they were scientific. This might have best been delivered through a chronological approach, offering a more traditional way to illustrate the development of the attributes over time, and identify any trends. Certainly, this would have enabled the kind of sequential treatment more expected from a ‘history’.

Finally, one has to wonder if a collaborative approach might not have allowed the content to deliver more authority than a monograph. The period under consideration is vast, and deserves more than a single volume. To have heard from historians perhaps more familiar than the author with the nuances of the past millennium, each considering how specific aspects within the study had developed, could  have added some academic rigour. Certainly the bibliography would have gained: whilst there is no reference to Abelard, Anselm or (St.) Augustine, and but a single nod to Aquinas, there are no less than thirty-four of the author’s own publications cited in the bibliography under the letter ‘A’, with copious further references in the remainder of the alphabet. This unfortunately gives an air of confirmation bias to a work which at times reads as a selection of model essays to accompany an undergraduate course taught by the author.

Ultimately, given the immensity of the scope, the difficulties with data, and the thematic complexity, one cannot help wondering if the volume was well-conceived: when Robert L. Heilbroner broke the ground in this field with his (still useful) Quest for Wealth, it was a work of significantly lesser ambition (and one apparently not considered in this study). Were the author familiar with this pioneering work, there might have been some resonance in the earlier writer’s reflection:

‘I became aware of how tremendously complex this seemingly simple and direct idea was. It seemed money led to economics and this in turn to sociology, and thus to anthropology and psychology, and finally on to moral philosophy itself. I was soon aghast at the scope of the undertaking and now, looking back upon it, am not a little abashed at my foolhardiness in attempting it.’[4]

Given the flaws identified in this review, this study, while admirable in purpose, is not something that can be recommended to either historians or the general reader. 

‘As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West’ by Guido Alfani was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press, (ISBN: 978-0-69-121573-0). 440pp.

[1] See Tom Arkell, ‘Illuminations and Distortions: Gregory King’s Scheme Calculated for the Year 1688 and the Social Structure of Later Stuart England’, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 2006):p65.

[2] ‘…people seek riches only as useful and a means to other things….Therefore, we should not hold that avarice is a capital sin’ De Malo, Question VIII.18, following Aristotle’s ‘Ethics’.

[3] [whether you send us money taken from us or from you,] in Recueil des Historiensdes Des Gaules et de la France, ed. Martin Bouquet et al. (Paris, 1869–1904) vol 15, p. 487.

[4] Heilbroner, Robert L., The Quest for Wealth – a Study of Acquisitive Man, (New York: Simon and Schuster; 1956), page 253; while this seminal work is not cited, Heilbroner’s definition of wealth in ‘The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics’ is.

Dr Andrew Fincham is an early-modern socio-economic historian affiliated to Woodbrooke College, University of Birmingham, UK. His research is concerned with understanding the links between religious values, ethical business, and commercial success; and the implications for responsible corporate governance. His current areas of interest include a revision of Quaker historiography and an exploration of the underlying issues in Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

The history of the liberals, radicals, socialists, feminists, and Christians who advocated for free trade as the necessary accompaniment to anti-imperialism and peace is the subject of Marc-William Palen’s Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. Pax Economica was a term promoted by Jane Addams of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, whose idealistic vision was of such a world after the catastrophe of the First World War (page 199).

Today, free trade is most often associated with neo-liberal economic thought but Palen demonstrates that its origins are rooted in nineteenth-century left-wing politics, with its advocates promoting a heady blend of peace, anti-imperialism, and free trade: a vision at odds with the powerful currents of nationalism, protectionism, and colonial expansion.

The book charts the continuous movements for free trade from the 1840s to the present day. Its scope is broad in time and space, with the core themes often intersecting with major events across the period. The vicissitudes of the drive for free trade as the harbinger of a peaceful world is prominent, and its mutability is closely considered and evaluated.

Palen reveals how, for some of its more left-wing adherents, free trade represented a challenge to imperialism and militarism. In its most idealistic form, it was held that free trade would create international bonds of union, dependence, and harmony which would make war obsolete. Suffice to say, that idealist vision has not materialized. 

Nonetheless, the vision of a ‘Pax Economica’ evolved to include supranational regulation, and the establishment of post-1945 liberal institutions such as the United Nations (UN), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) which did meet, albeit insipidly and ultimately disappointingly, their support for global governance and cooperation. Yet Palen’s work is not primarily a history of international institutions but rather a detailed study of the left-wing vision of globalism. In the main, this means a roll call of movements, pressure groups, and individuals, mostly those employing an ‘outsider strategy’ as a means of changing policy. The work is ambitious, immaculately researched, and a timely publication amid the resurgence of economic nationalism and geopolitical conflict. 

The text, divided into six chapters, ranges over an extensive landscape, encompassing the anti-imperialism of free trade, Christian pacifism, socialist internationalism, feminism, and Marxism. The idealism conflating free trade, peace, and prosperity is well-delineated, and the intellectual antecedents well-identified and contextualized, with Richard Cobden, Henry George, and Norman Angell referenced throughout in multiple contexts. The geographical diaspora of free trade sentiments is a fine testimony to the vibrancy and durability of these ideas. 

The book considers these developments, broadly defined, with short-hand organizing themes such as the ‘Marx-Manchester’ and ‘Marx-List’ traditions. Continuity of struggle and complexity of the tasks are keynotes of the work, from the battle against the systemic protectionism of the 1840s to the current disputes over trade liberalization and neoliberalism.

Indeed, divisions over the legitimacy of free trade principles were explicitly made with the publication of Friedrich List’s National System of Political Economy as early as 1841 at the height of the campaign for economic liberalization in Britain. Economic nationalism, as a counterpoint to free trade, features prominently, with List’s ‘infant industry’ framework and the ‘American System’ of Alexander Hamilton appearing equally, if not more, historically important, in the commercial policy of nations. The idea of tariffs as a shield against foreign competition, and more positively, as an economic development strategy, proved highly influential in the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and even Britain.

Free Trade has always been presented in many different guises, and Palen effectively demonstrates that it is intersectional and situational. It could be a liberal, socialist, or anti-colonial force, for the variegated ‘productive profile’ of nations meant it possessed different connotations and meanings on a country-specific basis. While viewed as a liberating measure in Victorian Britain, the same policy preferences led to it being considered by less-developed countries, such as India, Ireland, and China, as a tool of economic imperialism, used against territories which had ‘suffered under the yoke of British free-trade imperialism’ (page 109). Conversely, protectionism, while historically often reflecting the dominance of political and business elites, was often considered, especially in recent times, integral to the economic development of emerging states, and in anti-colonial national struggles. Hence the terminology of ‘Marx-List’ and ‘Marx-Manchester’ traditions as a way of understanding political economy preferences via national subjectivities and economic complexities. Undoubtedly owing to constraints of space, the book does not go far in its forensic analysis of divergent commercial policy preferences, and a particularly notable omission is the extent to which policy preferences were influenced by the fiscal demands of increasingly democratic electorates.

Chapters on free trade feminism and Christian pacifism demonstrate the continuing influence of Cobdenite ideas into the twentieth century. The final chapter takes the story up to the present day, charting the post-war Bretton Woods system, and the triumph of the Pax Americana and neoliberalism, with the caveat that economic nationalism aligned with infant-industry strategy continues to challenge the long-standing association between equity and free trade. Argentina is usefully highlighted as a case study of a nation adopting a growth strategy informed by Listian and American System ideas as ‘economic blueprints’ for development (page 196).

In a divided and unequal world, an absolutist stance for free trade has often been construed as entrenching inequality. Interestingly, free traders often reconciled these Global South infant-industry strategies as a rational, though hopefully temporary, response to Western neo-liberalism, which preached free trade but practiced protectionism. Most notable in that respect, despite the guiding principles of Reciprocity and Non-Discrimination promoted by the World Trade Organization, is the recent surge of regional trade agreements delimiting and protecting rather than expanding market access.

In some ways, the timing of the book’s publication in 2024 was unfortunate, and the idea that the ‘neo-liberal order has been placed on notice’, appears chimerical. With rising global geopolitical tensions, and war in Ukraine and Gaza, any notion of Pax Economica appears unlikely (page 222).

Nonetheless, the analysis within the book is broad-ranging, conceptually coherent, and highly informative. A particular strength is the ability of the author to convey the changing nature of free trade movements, yet while the breadth of the study is highly impressive, it does necessitate a sacrifice of depth in places.

The book is primarily an intellectual and institutional history with a plethora of organizations, acronyms, and an eclectic array of individuals. At times, it would have been useful to know how popular many of the cited organizations were, and how long they lasted. Some readers may find the numerous terms, ideologies, adjectives, and acronyms difficult to follow. Equally, the thematic approach means there is some reiteration and repetition.

Nomenclature is a little odd at times, with John Bright described as an ‘antislavery activist’ and Cobden as an ‘opponent of slavery’ (page 155). It is not that these descriptions are inaccurate but that they convey a limited view of individuals whose backstory is much wider than suggested by the description. There are also some contentious points, such as the claim that the Manchester School ‘envisaged the gradual decline of the nation-state, and with it the elimination of national rivalries and trade barriers’ (page 97). Despite its purported universalist and utopian principles, there existed many, maybe even Cobden himself, who supported free trade at least partly because it aligned with vested class and/or national interests. Self-interest could co-exist with or even be disguised by idealism. Indeed, trade agreements today, such as the USMCA, are examples of managed and negotiated free trade, which are a far cry from the voluntarist model promoted by free trade idealists portrayed within the book.

At times the book appears a somewhat breathless account (indicated by 65 pages of notes and a 20-page index) in covering so many events, times, and places but there is much to be gained from a close and careful reading of the text.

In sum, the book will interest scholars and general readers. It follows the tradition of ‘broad sweep’ history, informed by a considerable body of research and synthesis, and as such is thought-provoking, engaging, and interesting to read.

‘Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World’ by Marc-William Palen was published in 2024 by Princeton University Press (ISBN: 978-0-69-119932-0). 309pp

Gordon Bannerman is a professor teaching Business History at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Guelph-Humber, Ontario. His primary research interests focus on modern British political and economic history.

In this deeply researched study, Joseph Slaughter describes the organization, economic power, and cultural impact of three different Christian businesses in pre-Civil War America. He calls attention to the underappreciated of role of Christian enterprise in the development of capitalism and points to descendants of his three examples among evangelical businesses today.

Harmony is Slaughter’s first example. Under the zealous authority of George Rapp, the community of German Lutheran immigrants dominated textile manufacturing in several parts of Pennsylvania and Indiana in the 1820s and 1830s. Harmonists were not always welcome neighbors. With cotton mills, silkworm farms, and new steamboats, Harmonists competed for markets and resources with more efficient organization and more aggressive fiscal operations than their neighbors.

Expectations of Christ’s immanent return contributed to their work ethic and separatism from ordinary society. Rapp’s commune was laying the groundwork for Christ’s return, and the new millennium Christ would inaugurate. With that prospect in mind, community members worked as a unit with strict rules and a strong leader, apart from the allegedly corrupt world of their neighbors.

The Pioneer Stagecoach Line is Slaughter’s second example. In contrast to the separatist piety behind Harmonist enterprise, the Sabbatarian business led by Josiah Bissell, Jr. sought reform and moral improvement throughout American society. Unlike other stagecoach lines in upstate New York that ran seven days a week, the Pioneer Line stood firm against the sin of work on Sundays. Funded by Calvinist Presbyterians and Congregationalists, with cooperating inns along the line to accommodate rest and worship on Sundays, the Pioneer Line aspired to hold all Americans to the nation’s covenant with God, modeled on that of ancient Israel.

The Line enjoyed some initial success. Only a year after its inception in 1828, it commanded two-fifths of the market for stagecoach travel in the busy region around the newly opened Erie Canal. But this success was short-lived. While some riders welcomed morally upright travel, Josiah Bissell’s aggressive sanctimoniousness irritated others, making him a butt of jokes. The Line also struggled to find and retain experienced, cooperative drivers. It went out of business in the early 1830s.

Slaughter’s third and most compelling example of Christian business success is Harper & Brothers. Founded by four siblings and staunch Methodists, Harper’s grew from a printing business into the foremost publishing enterprise in pre-Civil War America. Headquartered in New York City, Harper & Brothers struck it rich with the Illuminated Bible they published in 1846, followed by the popular Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, first published in 1850 and still in print today under an amended title. Harper & Brothers is the most lucrative, expansive, and long-lasting of Slaughter’s examples.

In Slaughter’s typology of Christian businesses – Pietist, Reform, and Arminian – Harper’s exemplifies Arminianism, a theological term for belief in the free will often associated with Methodism. As an expression of their investment in free will, the Harper brothers approached their book and magazine business as means of encouraging virtue in individuals through helpful reading. The Harper Brothers engaged with individuals in the world around them, unlike the Harmonists whose Pietism demanded separation from the corruption of their neighbors. And unlike the challenge to Sunday travel posed by Sabbatarian stagecoaches, Slaughter characterizes the Harper’s Arminian enterprise as an effort not to Reform the world by challenging its immorality but to redeem the world through individual persuasion.

The great contribution of Slaughter’s book lies in his attention to three examples of Christian enterprise in the early United States, never studied as thoroughly before, or sufficiently appreciated for the varying degrees of economic and cultural influence they exerted. That said, Slaughter’s case for the importance of Christian enterprise in pre-Civil War America rests mainly on the shoulders of Harper & Brothers. While some conservative Christians complained about Harper & Brothers’ openness to fiction, and some intellectuals complained about the Brothers’ lack of interest in serious new literature, Harper publications played a major role in shaping the reading culture of nineteenth century America.

The relationship between the Harpers’ Arminianism and the emerging culture of American consumerism merits further discussion. Slaughter invites but does not pursue discussion of religion’s contribution to consumerism, and the prominent role of Methodism and its offshoots played in shaping and propelling its development.

There is also more to be said about the impact of economic and industrial development on Christian life in the early US. In his fine-tuned descriptions of industrial innovation at Harmony, the Pioneer Line, and Harper Brothers, Slaughter invites discussion of industrialism’s influence on American religion but does not develop it.

With respect to Slaughter’s claim that, “the role played by CBEs (Christian business enterprises) offers an alternative to the competing narratives of the Social Control and Democratization Schools” of American religious history, I would disagree. Slaughter’s examples point not to a third and alternative narrative for American religious history but rather to an interesting combination of social control and democratization.

It is difficult to imagine a stronger example of religion as a form of social control than George Rapp’s community. He ruled Harmony with a firm hand, organizing his people as if they were cogs in a machine, with each adult assigned to one specific task to be repeated perfectly. Rapp organized children as well, tasking them with powering mills and gathering worms.

The Reform stagecoach line established by Josiah Bissell can also be appreciated as an effort at social control. Bissell wanted Americans to observe the Sabbath as he thought it should be observed. His Pioneer Line was created to reform the business of American travel, based on the principle that Sabbath observance was fundamental to Christian life and to the nation’s upholding of its covenant with God.

With their commitment to reading as a means of persuading individuals toward virtue, Harper & Brothers falls more easily into a democratization narrative about American religious history. But the Harper’s story also shows how democratization and social control could be overlapping. The Harper story supports a democratization story in which a religious business is able to shape society precisely because it is more indirect, and more respectful of individual will than Pietist or Reform business.

Through the triumph of Arminianism outline in this book, Faith in Markets points to the integration of familiar and often competing narratives of social control and democratization. Evidence of that integration can be seen in the trajectory of Christian enterprise that Slaughter’s examples reveal. Readers interested in US economic history will enjoy this book, as will readers interested in the interplay of religion and American business.

‘Faith in Markets: Christian Capitalism in the Early American Republic’ by Joseph P. Slaughter was published in 2023 by Columbia University Press (ISBN: 978-0-23-119111-1). 400pp.

Amanda Porterfield, Emerita Professor of Religion at Florida State University, is the author of Corporate Spirit: Religion and the Rise of the Modern Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Economics of Good and Evil was originally published in Czech in 2009. Since then, it has been translated into 22 languages and, following its publication in English in 2011, it achieved something close to ‘bestseller’ status and made its author, Tomas Sedlacek, famous. Well over a decade on, it is worth asking whether the book has passed the test of time and justified the hype to which it was subjected. Sadly, the answer is, probably not.

Sedlacek says that the purpose of the book is ‘to look for economic thought in ancient myths and, vice versa, to look for myths in today’s economics’ (page 4). He adds that he seeks to ask four questions: ‘Is there an economics of good and evil? Does it pay to be good, or does good exist outside the calculus of economics? Is selfishness innate to mankind? Can it be justified if it results in the common good?’ (page 7). However, the book in fact ranges far and wide over any number of issues that Sedlacek considers relevant to his enquiry, including the history of economic thought, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and psychology. The first two-thirds comprise seven chapters focused on various strands of philosophy and religion to the extent that they are relevant to economic issues, starting with The Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with Adam Smith, and the issues discussed range from attitudes to work to the nature of truth.

Cutting through the detail, Sedlacek’s basic thesis is that the modern view that economics is ‘a mathematical-allocative science’ (page 4) is both an historical aberration and fundamentally wrong. He repeatedly reassures the reader that he is not opposed to mathematical economics in principle but he suggests that ‘contrary to what our text books say, economics is predominantly a normative field’ (page 6). In particular, he suggests that all economics is value laden and that we should be careful to examine the ‘many unexplained factors behind the scenes’ (page 275), a task which he refers to as ‘meta-economics’.

Although Sedlacek on occasion overstates his case, his basic argument is surely correct: if we are to confine economics to those matters that are purely descriptive and can be analysed by means of mathematical models, much of what is today termed economics would have to be redesignated; in fact, economists, whether overtly or implicitly consider goals and weigh desirable against undesirable consequences of actions, which necessarily requires the application of underlying values. Furthermore, even to be an accurate descriptive science, economics needs to have regard to matters, such as human psychology, that lie far beyond the precision of mathematics.

Sedlacek is likewise right in warning of the danger that the conclusions of economics may be implicit in hidden assumptions and, specifically, in challenging the concept of ‘utility’, suggesting that it is either tautologous (i.e. an assertion that people will maximise those things that they consider to be of worth) or wrong (i.e. an assertion that people only pursue purely economic goals).

He also challenges what he views as the modern obsession with economic growth, suggesting that ‘Material progress has become, in many ways, the secular religion and a major hope of our times’ (page 234). The danger of attacks of this kind is that they can easily lapse into a romanticism that ignores the enormous benefits of material progress. However, Sedlacek avoids this trap, recognising that ‘the pursuit of progress has enabled real progress’ (page 139). He suggests that ‘The solution we might seek is therefore not asceticism, but rather Sabbath economics’ (i.e. a more balanced approach that addresses a broad range of human wellbeing, page 244).

Sedlacek’s history based approach is helpful in relation to this. As he says, ‘History of thought helps us to get rid of the intellectual brainwashing of the age, to see through the intellectual fashion of the day, and to take a couple of steps back’ (page 4). Furthermore, some elements of his discussion of the relevant history are fascinating in their own right, including his discussion of the remarkable, sophisticated economic analysis of the Greek philosopher and general Xenophon, and his disentangling of the approaches of Mandeville and Smith, culminating in his suggestion that much modern economics is closer to Mandeville’s amoral views than to Smith’s moral philosophy. His analysis of different philosophical systems also allow him to pinpoint questions that are often not asked in the modern world (e.g. is it possible that, as the Bible implies, ethics can impact the economic cycle?).

There is thus much to commend in Economics of Good and Evil. However, the basic argument of the book is wrapped in a web of other material that distracts and confuses the reader and is in many respects, at least, highly contentious. A significant proportion of Sedlacek’s discussion of religious thought comes within this category, although it also contains a number of insightful comments.

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Some of these wrong or contentious statements are irrelevant to the main argument of the book (e.g. his suggestion that the concept of the ‘Kingdom of God’ is not to be found in the Old Testament – it is [see, for example, Psalm 45:6] – and his apparent belief that the Old Testament commands hatred for enemies – it does not) and some are simply silly misunderstandings (e.g. his apparent failure to recognise that the statement that ‘Almost all real numbers are irrational’ [page 285] is not a statement about the relationship of certain numbers to reason). However, some of the book’s other defects are more serious.

Sedlacek is prone to overstatement (e.g. ‘our modern economic theories based on rigorous modelling are nothing more than … meta narratives retold in different [mathematical?] language’, [page 5]) and he uses language loosely without clearly defining his meaning. In particular, he is imprecise in his use of the terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (a significant failing having regard to the title of the book!) and sometimes speaks in riddles (e.g. ‘Man is naturally unnatural and unnaturally natural. We’re more natural when we aren’t natural’ [page 324]; ‘If I’ve written about what we should abandon, the question of what to return to should come more easily. The answer appears to be as follows: Step down from Babylon’s ivory tower before the confusion of languages [no one understanding anyone or anything] is completed’ [page 328]). He is also guilty of significant leaps of logic, tends to assert things without careful argument and, most significantly of all, adopts highly contentious philosophical positions.

He admits that his approach is post-modern and this is very evident in his treatment of truth (e.g. ‘What is truth? What is the nature of truth? Does truth lend itself more readily to scientific enquiry or is truth more of a poetic issue?’ [page 299], and ‘Facts and “objective reality” are fuzzy’ [page 301]). He also suggests that reason and emotion are ‘two poles of the same continuum’ (page 312) and he adopts a thorough going nominalist metaphysical position (e.g. ‘Mathematics is a purely abstract creation of our minds – nothing more nothing less’ [page 292], and ‘the world itself does not contain [mathematical concepts] [as it contains no other abstractions]’ [page 310]). The overall result is that his philosophy proves to be lacking in firm foundations.

Sedlacek admits that ‘this is not a book of answers’ (page 330) and, in reality, all that he has done is to provide good reasons for treating economics as being something rather more than a positivistic mathematical exercise. He is right that the psychological, philosophical and ethical dimensions to economic questions need to be recognised. Human beings cannot be described in mathematical equations and values and ethics are critical to both the exercise of defining the kind of society that we want and seeking to establish it. However, this task does not require that we buy in to Sedlacek’s philosophical approach, which is in any event too vague to be useful.

‘Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street’ by Thomas Sedlacek was published in the English language in 2011 by Oxford University Press (ISBN: 978-0-19-932218-3). 331pp.

Richard Godden is a Lawyer and has been a Partner with Linklaters for over 30 years during which time he has advised on a wide range of transactions and issues in various parts of the world.

Richard’s experience includes his time as Secretary at the UK Takeover Panel and he is currently a member of the Panel. He also served as Global Head of Client Sectors, responsible for Linklaters’ industry sector groups, and was a member of the firm’s Executive Committee.