On his book Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx
Cover Interview of September 16, 2020
A close-up
The first part of the book tells a story of
disappointments with our ability to forecast the future of capitalism. This
story unfolds in several stages: the Victorian era (Chapter 1), the interwar
period (Chapter 2), and the postwar period until the early 1980s (Chapter 3).
In the camp of the anticapitalist left, one comes across the betrayed hopes of
many old acquaintances, from Karl Marx to Herbert Marcuse. In the conservative
and liberal camp, on the other hand, examples range from Friedrich Hayek’s
phobia of socialism to Daniel Bell’s moralistic anxieties about the affluent
society. In between, one makes more unexpected encounters such as those with
John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes.
Chapter 4 continues with an analysis of
what has gone wrong with our thinking about the economy and society since the
1990s, a section that could perhaps be of special interest to those who are
looking for the roots of the troubled political times we are in. It challenges
a number of myths: the myth of the “end of history” and the triumph of the
liberal order; the myth that the postindustrial age would erase class conflict
and turn workers into high-tech capitalists; the myth that the notions of “left”
and “right” have lost their meaning, and so on. The book went to press too
early for me to be able to cover the expectations of radical change triggered
by the 2020 pandemic, but ample space is devoted to the hopes of seeing
capitalism overthrown that followed the global financial crisis at the turn of
the 2010s.
To those impatient to reach the book’s
conclusions, however, I would suggest focusing on the last two chapters.
Chapter 5, a rather disenchanted reflection on the legacy of the Enlightenment,
contains the key to all previous chapters. Chapter 6, which I mentioned earlier,
seeks on the other hand to answer the questions of what capitalism is, what
keeps it alive, and to what extent it can be overcome.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
A close-up
The first part of the book tells a story of disappointments with our ability to forecast the future of capitalism. This story unfolds in several stages: the Victorian era (Chapter 1), the interwar period (Chapter 2), and the postwar period until the early 1980s (Chapter 3). In the camp of the anticapitalist left, one comes across the betrayed hopes of many old acquaintances, from Karl Marx to Herbert Marcuse. In the conservative and liberal camp, on the other hand, examples range from Friedrich Hayek’s phobia of socialism to Daniel Bell’s moralistic anxieties about the affluent society. In between, one makes more unexpected encounters such as those with John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes.
Chapter 4 continues with an analysis of what has gone wrong with our thinking about the economy and society since the 1990s, a section that could perhaps be of special interest to those who are looking for the roots of the troubled political times we are in. It challenges a number of myths: the myth of the “end of history” and the triumph of the liberal order; the myth that the postindustrial age would erase class conflict and turn workers into high-tech capitalists; the myth that the notions of “left” and “right” have lost their meaning, and so on. The book went to press too early for me to be able to cover the expectations of radical change triggered by the 2020 pandemic, but ample space is devoted to the hopes of seeing capitalism overthrown that followed the global financial crisis at the turn of the 2010s.
To those impatient to reach the book’s conclusions, however, I would suggest focusing on the last two chapters. Chapter 5, a rather disenchanted reflection on the legacy of the Enlightenment, contains the key to all previous chapters. Chapter 6, which I mentioned earlier, seeks on the other hand to answer the questions of what capitalism is, what keeps it alive, and to what extent it can be overcome.