Let me cut to the chase.

Where does the book that is John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics travel to and arrive at, in the end? To mix metaphors, Capitalism and Its Critics is a polyphony. It is without a single dominant note, chord, or phrase. It, rather, has repeated themes—themes sounded again and again as Cassidy traverses 250 years and 30-odd observers and critics of capitalism. For, in Cassidy’s words, “[T]he central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming.”

(1) Of Cassidy’s repeatedly sounded themes, the principal one to my ear is that of capitalism’s critics not making up any sort of coherent whole but still being very much worth listening to. And indeed they are, at best, truly strange bedfellows. As Thomas Carlyle put it, the critics of capitalism (including himself) were not a coherent group with a plan for a better world than this, but rather were expressing “popular commotions and maddest bellowings.” These commotions and bellowings, “from Peterloo to the Place-de-Grève,” were “inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain” and “to the ear of wisdom…[are] prayers: ‘Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!’”

Put much more charitably than Carlyle’s ventriloquism of Chartist activists he perhaps never talked to, the system violates what my friend Dan Davies sees as a sine qua non principle of human organizations: that “big corporations and states need to have information channels”—he calls them “red-handle signals”—to “bypass the normal hierarchy and get information to the decision making centre, in time.” The lack of such channels, Davies writes, “has caused so many schemes to fail,” and their “continued presence, albeit in highly unsatisfactory and attenuated form…accounts for the fact that the democratic industrialised world still does kind of work, a bit.”

But in capitalism there is only one information channel: the price. And no matter what the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde genius-idiot Friedrich von Hayek may have claimed, that is not enough to keep any large-scale societal network-system from going off the rails.

But there is no consensus about what kind of red-handle signals need to be built in. As John Maynard Keynes wrote a century ago in an earlier systemic crisis of the capitalism of his age: “We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas…. No one has a gospel.” We need to think hard about what our tangible ideal for a better system might be. But we have been unable to even begin to start that thinking process in the now-long 17 years since the September 2008 breakdown of the authority of the North Atlantic political economy’s Neoliberal Order.

(2) Almost as prominent of the themes in the polyphony—at least to my ear—is Cassidy’s belief that now, finally, 250 years after he starts his survey, capitalism is ending with fragmentation and incoherence. Nearly half of Americans see capitalism as on the wrong path; new conservatives are joining the left-wing critiques of globalization and financialization; leftists and conservatives alike blame capitalism for collapsed communities and cultural degradation; believers in state-guided capitalism are squaring off against laissez-faire techno-utopians hoping cyberspace will route around all governments. Vanished is the coalition of labor, mass-production industry, and Keynesian technocrats who saw the New Deal Order of the mass-production economy as the right path. Dissolving is the alliance of globalization-embracing educated elites and free-market ideologues who saw the Neoliberal Order of the globalized value-chain economy as the right path. Dashed are hopes we would be saved by teamwork-based open-source, and hopes that the gig economy might be a source of liberation rather than of worker speedup and barely legal wage theft, with Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles as they bring things to my house and my last Uber driver getting only 25 percent of what I paid the app. And while we may see intensity, we see no good conviction in the right-wing populism of the billionaires, or in left-wing protest encampments, cooperatives, and artisanal networks pushing for “degrowth,” commons-based activism, and gift economies.

The view that capitalism is in any sense approaching its last day is, I think, flatly wrong. People would have said the same in the mid-1930s, not seeing the New Deal Order of mass-production capitalism sprouting all around them. People did say the same thing in the 1970s, not understanding the speed with which capitalism was transforming itself into the globalized value-chain variant that would then so strongly underpin the Neoliberal Order. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1857 may have been the first to mistake the birth pangs of a new mutation of capitalism for the beast’s final death throes. Don’t make their mistake. Indeed, at the end of his book, Cassidy pulls back from capitalism is dying to capitalism mutates.

(3) Indeed, it does. Looking back at our history, we see it mutate so many times, and so comprehensively each time, that I have all but given up using the bare word “capitalism.” These days I teach about classical-world capitalism, medieval capitalism, agricultural capitalism, colonial capitalism, mercantile capitalism, steampower capitalism, applied-science capitalism, mass-production capitalism, globalized value-chain capitalism, and what we will perhaps call attention info-bio tech capitalism. You need at least ten variants, rather than to think that in some way it is all the same beast (or to draw only a single distinction between “capitalism” and “late capitalism”).

Because capitalism mutates, no one single system of societal and political regulation, no single political-economy order, can be both durable and satisfactory for long. Before World War I, the pseudo-democratic, semi-liberal Belle Époque order of steampower-age capitalism did give humanity the best half-century it had ever had: an economic El Dorado, as John Maynard Keynes put it, of previously unimagined general prosperity plus growing democracy and reduced hierarchy and oppression. But as steampower capitalism morphed into applied-science capitalism, the old political-economy order and attempts to restore it to health brought first World War I, then a Great Depression. What had produced the best two generations of human progress that history had ever seen—in the era after the 1848 revolutions and before World War I—no longer worked. And so, frantic and failing attempts to restore the Belle Époque Order were submerged with the rise of fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, plus Imperial Japan’s catching of a bad new variant of the Western European nationalist-racist-imperialist virus.

Only diehard, card-carrying neoliberals still dare to claim today that the shift from the social-democratic New Deal to the Neoliberal Order was a satisfactory way of managing capitalism’s mutation from its mass-production to its globalized value-chain variant.

And now we have no clue what political economy would allow human flourishing to further advance, as capitalism’s genome shifts again to the capitalism of the attention info-bio tech age.

(4) Cassidy sees capitalism delegitimizing itself—especially now, but also repeatedly in the past. I think here he suffers from myopia and an optical illusion. Over its very long career, capitalism has very rarely been seen as legitimate by anyone. Yes, the post-1980, pre-2008 Neoliberal Order did contain the extravagant ideological claim that capitalism, or democratic capitalism, was in some sense a legitimate order. But not even Hayek saw it as in any sense moral. Hayek’s ideas were: (a) A market economy and private property—capitalism—make up a mighty and powerful human social engineering device for attaining prosperity by crowdsourcing the best attainable solutions to the problems of what to make and how to make it. (b) But capitalism also produces great inequality and unfairness, as it rewards not the truly deserving but rather those lucky enough to control the right resources at the right time. (c) Alternatives fail to produce prosperity while also failing to produce anything anyone might ever reasonably and properly call social justice; they reward not the lucky and the productive but rather the powerful—whether aristocracies, oligarchies, or some managerial “new class.” (d) Hence capitalism places us in the position of the highly unfortunate Biblical character Job: We need to accept that “capitalism giveth; capitalism taketh away; blessed be capitalism’s name,” for seeking an alternative will only ever end in one of the many roads to serfdom.

It was only during the Neoliberal Order’s heyday that things went further. Only then were there serious claims that greed was good per se—that success in the capitalist marketplace was the sole touchstone of true moral virtue and deservingness. Otherwise, capitalism has been seen not as legitimate, but rather as somewhat tolerable, and only when properly managed, either by a democracy or by some aristocracy of power, wealth, culture, or technocratic expertise.

And I hear many more repeated themes in this book of some 260,000 words covering 30-odd observers and critics of the thing called “capitalism” across two and a half centuries.

How did John Cassidy—one of the very best economic journalists we have today, and one of the very few who does not work for a business-elite-oriented publication—come to write this book?

He says that he first conceived of it as “a shortish history of contemporary capitalism and the economic debates it has engendered, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present.” He quickly found himself, as one does, being dragged further into the past: reading Adam Smith on the “privileged position and egregious self-dealing” of the East India Company and concluding that many “criticisms of modern capitalism” are rooted in “developments and debates that took place during the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain and even before that.”

Having myself three years ago published a book that came in at 190,000 words (as I failed to cut more of my original half-million words of drafts and notes), I understand how Cassidy wound up with this book inside one single set of covers. But its length makes reading the book a major commitment. For those who choose to listen to the audiobook, please set aside 23 hours. For the typical reader of Democracy, reading it would take 17. I am fortunate: It took me seven from cover to cover.

But if we really want a book we read to become a true part of us and our cognitive-intellectual panoply, we need to do more than just read it cover to cover, once. We need to read actively. We start with the black squiggles on the page. From them we spin up a sub-Turing instantiation of the mind of the author. We then run that sub-Turing instantiation on our own wetware—and argue with it. We argue with it while reading, while reflecting, in the shower, and walking the dog. And so we truly learn. By the end, I had spent 20 hours with John Cassidy in the form of this book (and more in the past: I remember well his New Yorker articles—“The Fountainhead,” “Smoke Signals,” “Motown Down,” “A World of Woes,” and others). And then I sat down to write this review.

Was it worth spending my time on this, rather than on something else? For me, Cassidy’s book provided:

• a visa to the countries of seven thinkers whom I readily admit I did not know, and ought to have: Bolts, Thompson, Wheeler, Tristan, Kondratiev, Kumarappa, Georgescu-Roegen, and Federici.
• the opportunity to revisit and rethink my scant knowledge and unformed views about six more: Carlyle, George, Veblen, Hobson, Sweezy, and Williams.
• and the John Stuart Millian impulsion to take seriously what a smart person who sees things differently than I do thinks about authors that I think I know very well indeed—Smith, General Ludd, Engels, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Kalecki, Robinson, Prebisch, Friedman, Hall, Hayek, Amin, Rodrik, Stiglitz, and Piketty.

For me, reading and thinking and then writing up this review of Cassidy was a great treat. Perhaps I feel like Yakov at Jabbok’s Ford, having wrestled all night with the shadowy figure that was the High God El only to emerge having gained strength, for El only won as dawn was breaking by cheating. It was very much worth doing. And not because I will be paid for it by Democracy.

Is it worth reading Cassidy from cover to cover? Well, what else would you do with your time? What other big books are you going to read this year? If you buy it and start it, you will indeed find on every page something that will make you glad to have read the page, and enough narrative momentum to make you eager to turn to the next. But the pile of very good books you might read this year is high. And Capitalism and Its Critics is likely to crowd two others out of your reading life.

Is it worth buying Cassidy and dipping into the text periodically, even if you do not think you will ever manage to read it in full? Here again I say, yes. If you have a book budget big enough to include things you are not overwhelmingly likely to read cover to cover, John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics belongs inside it.

But suppose that you are mostly interested in being able to understand conversations that reference this book, egged on—as you probably will be—by writers who expect you to know it. The book certainly punches at a level that ought to make it, to badly mix metaphors, an intellectual buoy people will use to orient themselves on our current sea of troubles. Or suppose, less charitably, that you want to appear a knowledgeable, erudite, au courant person. What then?

Well, that is one thing that reviews like this are for, isn’t it?