Capital ideas

DONALD SASSOON is won over by a comprehensive study of economic theorists and their ideas, despite some key omissions

- DONALD SASSOON

This impressive book - based on an astonishingly wide-ranging reading, and written with adamantine clarity - deals far more with the critics than with capitalism.

These critics fall roughly into three categories. Reactionaries (such as Thomas Carlyle) hark back to a pre-industrial age in which money, trade, commerce and other despicable activities were not so all-important. Revolutionaries (such as Marx, Engels and Rosa Luxemburg) wish to abolish capitalism in favour of a new social system in which the ownership of capital would no longer dominate. The majority, meanwhile, are those who think that capitalism needs reforming in order to improve it or to save it from its self-destructive tendencies - people ranging from Adam Smith (quite rightly not described, as he often is, as an uncritical exponent of laissez-faire capitalism) all the way to John Maynard Keynes. There is also a fourth category: those who analyse capitalism to understand it.