A wave of new books argue that capitalism isn’t doomed
With the world in mortal crisis throughout the 1930s, the leading capitalist intellectuals of the day met in a series of fraught conferences. Horrified by the advances of totalitarianism, economists like John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi and Ludwig von Mises clashed, tried to understand what had gone wrong and sought a version of capitalism that people would accept. Today’s intellectual ferment among capitalists is uncomfortably similar. It’s no longer left to socialists or progressives to criticize free markets. Capitalists themselves are convinced they are facing the gravest crisis since the 1930s. The Harvard historian Sven Beckert just published an immensely ambitious 1,300-page tome simply titled Capitalism. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/541160/capitalism-by-sven-beckert/ His book is the latest in a stream of interventions that all start from the assumption that capitalism needs to be fixed, from The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by the Fi...