Capitalism has a way of confounding its critics. Like one of those fairground punching bags, it pops right back up every time a crisis knocks it down. Friedrich Engels learned this the hard way. “The American crash is superb,” he enthused in a letter to Karl Marx in 1857: this was communism’s big chance. Well, not quite. The US Treasury stepped in, recapitalising banks with its gold reserves; in Britain the Bank Charter Act was suspended to enable the printing of money. The rulebook was torn up and capitalism saved.
So it has always been. Every time we have teetered close to the precipice, big government has swooped down to save the day. The name of the game is “managed capitalism” and it has been a going concern for more than 200 years. This is the theme of John Cassidy’s new book, a marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose – if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle.
