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