Rogan, Tim Primary Author mixed material bibliography USA Princeton University Press 2018 en English

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277 p. What’s wrong with capitalism? In the twenty-first century, the answer seems simple: inequality. Material disparities between the rich and the rest are widening.1 Prosperity has become the preserve of too few. This emphasis on material inequality seems unremarkable in our own time. But in historical perspective it is extraordinary. It represents a radical truncation of the parameters of the critique of capitalism. An alternative critical tradition focused less on material outcomes than on moral or spiritual consequences has fallen into disuse. This book explains how that happened, and why it matters, and what might be done about it. The term “capitalism” was coined by social critics in nineteenth-century Germany and Britain apprehensive about the nature and tempo of social change in the era of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.2 It described the new form of society in which acquisitive instincts long deemed vicious and countermanded by legal and cultural strictures came to be seen as virtuous and beneficent. Concerns about inequality have always been part of the argument against capitalism. But until very recently they were never the whole or even the major part of that argument. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, poverty mattered less to capitalism’s critics than moral or spiritual desolation. In the twenty-first century, economic arguments take precedence. Vivid moral argument has given way to calculations of advantage and disadvantage fortified with anger and indignation. Considered from some angles, this replacement of moral argumentation with an emphasis on material outcomes is an improvement. It enables reasonable, empirical discussion of the problem, which in turn promises to identify rational, practicable reforms: woolly, inscrutable polemic has given way to exacting analysis. Written from this perspective, an account of the means by which moral argumentation yielded to a focus on material inequality might play out as an upbeat story, a whig history for technocratic progressives The Moral Economicst 330.959 9780691173009 PUSTAKA LABORA Open Source Library Management System 330.959 ROG t A000875 My Library (Ebook) 330.959 ROG t The Moral Economists 91CbE439loL._AC_UF1000%252C1000_QL80_.jpg.jpg 1131 2025-02-12 11:37:43 2025-02-12 11:39:27 machine generated