capitalism essay titles

248 Capitalism Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for capitalism essay topics? The economic system considered the most advanced and effective is worth exploring!

• 💸 Research Questions
• 🏆 Best Topic Ideas & Essay Examples
• 👍 A+ Essay Examples
• 🎓 Interesting Essay Topics
• 📌 Hot Topics to Write about

💡 Most Interesting Capitalism Topics to Write about

✍️ capitalism essay topics for college.

• ❓ Research Paper Topics

In your capitalism essay, you might want to focus on its key features or history. Another idea is to talk about the pros and cons of capitalism, discussing why it is good or bad. One more option is to compare capitalism and socialism. Whether you are assigned to write an argumentative essay, research paper, or thesis on capitalism, this article will be helpful. Here you’ll find everything you might need to write an A+ paper! Capitalism research questions, prompts, and title ideas are collected below. Best capitalism essay examples are also added to inspire you even more.

💸 Research Questions about Capitalism

• How did capitalism in its modern form appear?
• What are the key ideas of mercantilism?
• What is the relationship between capitalism and democracy?
• How did globalization help capitalism spread worldwide?
• Is inequality inevitable in a capitalist economy?
• What are the key characteristics of modern capitalism?
• What are the ways to ensure fair competition in a capitalist economy?
• What is the role of wage labor in capitalism?
• How to protect private property in capitalist economy?
• What are the disadvantages of capitalism?

🏆 Best Capitalism Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• Marx vs. Weber on Capitalism Besides, this time was the period of the close attention of the sociologists to the bourgeois society and the development of capitalism.”The debate over the relationship between Marx’s political economy and Max Weber’s interpretative sociology, […]
• “The State in Capitalist Society” by Ralph Miliband According to Anonymous, this book has played a major role in the renewal of both “state theory and Marxist political thought”.”The state in capitalist society” is a piece of work that has remained to be […]
• Similarities Between Capitalism and Socialism. Compare & Contrast In this system, the government manages the overall means of production but the members have the duty of choosing the best setting for the production, the amount to produce and which product should be produced.
• Max Weber – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber in his book the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism sought to explain the emergence of the modern capitalism and the origin of the modern secular and industrial society.
• What Is the Relationship Between Capitalism and Democracy? The importance of the roles played by the stock market in the capitalistic economy is related considerably to the aspects of democracy and free market.
• Nationalism Versus Capitalism: Compare & Contrast According to Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, the main disadvantage of capitalism is prosperity that seduces workers with the items of comfort and makes them forget their primarily aim of overthrowing the capitalism.
• H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” as Critique of Capitalism In the reality of the world that the book inhabits, the Eloi, who live above ground, represent the upper class, and the Morlocks, who live below ground, represent the lower class.
• Capitalism and Globalization Effects However, according to an article by Anderson, in free market capitalism, initial wealth is created, which then spreads; it then leads to the social and political change due to the increase of power in the […]
• Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism They were enslaved by the bourgeoisie and machinery hence, they became a majority and were empowered in the light of the competitive bourgeoisie class, which created commercial conflicts and fluctuated the earning of the working […]
• Evolution of Capitalism: Concept, Origin and Development The central idea in the ‘Evolution of Capitalism’ is that western society is archetypical of a radical change and gradual development of the capitalist system.
• Climate Change: Is Capitalism the Problem or the Solution? This means that capitalism, which is the ability to produce wealth lies in the solution and also the causes of the current global climatic governance.
• Communism and Capitalism Through the History In this system, the means of product and service production is mainly carried out and owned by the individuals instead of the government while communism also known as fascism is contrary to this where production […]
• Differences Between Capitalism and Socialism In capitalist economic models, the rate of employment is determined by the pressures of demand and supply in the labor markets.
• Lenin on Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin, in his analysis on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, stated that the integration of bank capital with the industrial capital facilitates the creation of financial oligarchy.
• Varieties of Capitalism in China The field deals with the relationship between the labor market and investors within a country and the dynamics that govern them.
• Christians in Communism and Capitalism After viewing the video “The Cold War in Context,” the role of Christians in analyzing the war and the concepts of capitalism and communism can be clarified.
• The Effects of Capitalism on People’s Diet Food capitalism has brought about new changes in the human diet and has changed the nutritional value of foods eaten by human beings.
• Capitalism and Its Influence on the Environment The characteristic will be determined by both benefits to the environment and the overall result for the company, as companies should implement the changes willingly. The results are expected to be a set of suggestions […]
• Capitalism Versus Environmental Sustainability Free market refers to a market where prices are derived through competition among the individual businesses and not under the regulation of the government.
• Arguments Against Capitalism This is in the sense that capitalistic economies are influenced by free markets where the effects of pull and push of the demand, versus the supply affects the prices that are in the market.
• Capitalism Versus Communism In the case of capitalism this comes in the form of the widening gap between the rich and the poor while in the case of communism this comes in the form of economic stagnation due […]
• Canada as a Liberal Capitalist Democracy It includes also the re-organization of the enterprises in order to make a profit, for instance, changing management of the enterprise or adding new departments in the organization.
• Work Ethics in a Capitalist American Society This is unlike the employees at the restaurant who wanted to get rid of customers as fast as they could and had the contempt to the extent of provoking customers to seek management’s intervention.
• Corporate Social Responsibility: Socialist and Capitalist Perspective The state should ensure that tranquility and calmness is in the society. The role of the state is to provide guidelines that would bring sanity in business.
• Capitalism Characteristics and American Identity The aim of colonization was occupation of new lands and new ways of wealth accumulation for France and Britain. The plantation was an instrument in the growth of trade and industrial development, and can be […]
• Stakeholder and Shareholder Capitalism Models In the shareholder capitalism model, shareholder interests are the main concern, while in stakeholder model shareholder interest is on equal ground with concerns and interests of other stakeholders, such as the community, the employees, the […]
• “New Capitalism” by Peston From that background, he then goes a mile further and circumspectly analyzes the current form of capitalism which he calls “New Capitalism” and explicates its diverse effects including: the progressively widening gap between the “haves” […]
• Alienation and Capitalism The idea of alienation was developed by Karl Marx and it can be used to analyze the nature of human interaction in the current world.
• Capitalism: Exploitation of the Poor and Resource Monopoly Most defenders to capitalism would not agree to this objection because they believe capitalism presents equal opportunity to both the poor and the rich.
• Rhetorical Analysis of Socialism vs. Capitalism by Thompson In order to convey this message, the author uses several rhetorical devices, the discussion of which is part of this analysis.
• The Theory of Capitalism and Its Current Context One of the main acknowledgments correlating with the Scottish philosopher is the establishment of the notion and foundation of the “free market”, the system in which supply and demand shape prices.
• Infrastructure in Capitalism and Socialism Systems The Garden City concept, based on building around the decentralized plant, does not reduce the pressure on the central part of the city and the growing population of the modern world.
• The Capitalism Development in Russia In the book The Communist Manifesto, the authors view capitalism as a brief economic form destined to fail to lead to a rise in the communist system. Capitalism was attributed to the harsh inequalities of […]
• Capitalism: Definition and History Further, this system indeed considers the needs and interests of private actors to be of vital importance and does not allow the authorities to control the trade and industry of the country.

👍 A+ Capitalism Essay Examples

• Discussion of Racial Capitalism Issue on Modern Society This stance contributes to the idea of the significance of political processes in the worsening of the situation for individuals who are likely to be exploited by the system.
• British Capitalism: Nature and Characteristics It discusses the nature and characteristics of Britain’s capitalism by outlining its history and how the principal city, London, plays a critical role in the spread of capitalism.
• Discussion: Ecology and Capitalism The four laws of ecology include ‘everything is connected to everything else,’ ‘everything must go somewhere,’ ‘nature knows best,’ and ‘nothing comes from nothing.’ The four laws of capitalism are ‘the only lasting connection between […]
• Jamaica and the Modern Capitalism Countries in Western Europe and Australia, and North American countries belong to the group of core countries. On the contrary, periphery countries in most of Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe tend to have relatively […]
• Capitalism and Racism in Past and Present Racism includes social and economic inequalities due to racial identity and is represented through dispossession, colonialism, and slavery in the past and lynching, criminalization, and incarceration in the present.
• Surveillance Capitalism on Digital Platforms The appearance of capitalism was associated with the formation of the working class and affluent owners of production, but the new surveillance capitalism altered the classic perception of this system.
• Capitalism Is Not a Good Governance Solution in the Pandemic The capitalist flow of goods and services across the world and the role of governments in this was a major setback in the fight against the pandemic.
• Social Inequality, Capitalism, and Globalization It replaces slavery of antiquity and negatively affects almost all aspects of society, from the inequality of men and women to the sphere of science and education.
• Capitalism Development & Racial Issues in Rochester Hence, the authors show the importance of the topics about race through the extensive description of the development of the work culture in one city.
• Varieties of Capitalism and Employee Relations In providing the comparison for employee relations, the VoC approach has the strength of drawing attention to sectoral, national, and social responses to the crisis and the globalization challenges.
• Potency of Free Speech in Capitalist Society The rapid change in technology, discovery and rediscovery of the previous history, and the process of actively redefining what it means to be human, all contribute to the general diversification of the world.
• Capitalism as an Economic System: Op-Ed The main point of the letter to the editor. The letter I have chosen to respond to concerns the topic of capitalism.
• Capitalism, Black Marxism and Social Balance Thus, capitalism and racism developed as a consequence of the evolution of Western society, while Black radicalism was a response to this process.
• Abstract Dynamics of Capitalism and Daily Experiences of Business and Society Crucial historical transformations such as the back-rolling of capitalist west welfare states, decline or crucial metamorphosis of party states which were bureaucratic in the communist East, and weakening of the economic sovereignty of nation-states have […]
• Capitalism Approach: Attributes and Disadvantages It also offers theoretical and analytical methods to recognize the commonalities and dissimilarities between countries and groups of nations in the region.
• Flint Water Crisis: Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism The Flint crisis is a result of the neoliberal approach of the local state as opposed to the typical factors of environmental injustice; a polluter or a reckless emitter cutting costs. The two main factors […]
• Modern Capitalism in Great Britain This leads to the emergence of social classes in society, with the elites who own most business enterprises at the top of the hierarchy.
• “What Is Capitalism?” Article by Jahan and Mahmud Its main idea is based on the discussion of capitalism characteristics and its impact on the modern economy. On the other hand, inequality provokes controversies and questions the effectiveness of capitalism.
• Is There an Ethical Case for Capitalism? The most essential feature of capitalism is the incentive to make a profit based on the canonical principles, including private property, self-interest, competition, market mechanism, freedom of choice, and the limited role of the state.
• Financial Markets as an Element of the Capitalist Economy Model The story demonstrates various use of the financial market by involved stakeholders such as Credit Suisse, Archegos, investors and lenders for the Archegos, as well as shareholders of Credit Suisse.
• The Supply of Money in the Capitalist Economy In the capitalist economy that the world is currently based on, the supply of money plays a significant role in not only affecting salaries and prices but also the growth of the economy.
• “Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist” by R. Lowenstein The book provides an avenue for Investors and businessmen to learn a lot from the thoughts of Warren Buffett on issues pertaining to business and the methods he applies when making investments.
• Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism I agree with the statement because people with different cultures have different ways of doing things and architecture is one of the crucial tools used to express the culture of the people.
• Shared Value: Business Organizations and Capitalism Systems The intention of the review, authors and the title of the article: This paper will review the views presented by the authors on business organizations and capitalism systems to draw informed and objective conclusion.
• The Various Aspects of Capitalism Communism is a sociopolitical faction whereby the means of production, such as land, labor, and machinery, are possessed and managed by “the state”, and individuals control only a small portion of the means of production.
• Edward Luttwak’s Turbo-Capitalism: Danger or Blessing? And these are some of the reasons to read his book and agree or disagree with the writer’s points of view on the present and future world economy. The main points of the author lie […]
• Saving Capitalism: Video and the Articles Analysis The video and the articles analyzed in the paper allow for a comprehensive understanding of current issues, with the increasing income inequality that undermines the virtues of capitalism being the major challenge.
• Stages of History, Capitalism, Class Conflict, and Labor Theory in Adam Smith’s Writings The stages of history in Adam Smith’s writing, as reiterated by Paganelli, are the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture, and the age of commerce.
• Trans-Atlantic Chattel Slavery and the Rise of the Modern Capitalist World System The reading provides an extensive background of the historical rise and fall of the African nations. The reading gives a detailed account of the Civil War and the color line within its context.
• Triumph of Capitalism and Liberalism in Kagan’s “The Jungle Grows Back” In this situation, Kagan argues that it is not rational for the US “to mind its own business and let the rest of the world manage its problems”. It is to demonstrate the need to […]
• “Capitalism in America: The History” by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge Such books are now divided into the synchronic and diachronic ones, where the latter ones examine the economics in the context of history, and the first focus on modern development. Hence, the major value of […]
• Capitalism: Contemporary Political Culture Various theories and ideologies have been introduced to try to establish awareness of the socio-economic and political nature of the life of various people in different societies.
• Anti-Capitalism: Social Phenomenon Thus, the younger generations are most likely to be polarized by the ideology of anti-capitalism, which is a divisive issue, since they are opposed to the idea of a few individuals in society controlling trade […]
• The Relations Between Capitalism and Socialism On the other hand, Marx defined socialism as a principle that ensures the most of these production factors are owned and controlled by the society or the state for the benefit of the whole community […]

🎓 Interesting Capitalism Essay Topics

• Phenomenon of the Capitalism and Socialism The system values private ownership with the price system as the system of determining the rate of exchange of goods and services.
• Capitalism in America in 1865-1930’s The capitalist economy of the US between the 1865 and 1930 laid a framework for the present American economic system. The objective of the union was to protect the rights of the workers, who were […]
• Economic Way Between Communism or Socialism and Capitalism in China A positive example of this mix is Israel, where socialism is dominant in the rural areas and capitalism, is dominant in the urban areas, this has led to an increase in the welfare of the […]
• Oligarchic Capitalism and Russia’s Global Resurgence The governments in many oligarchic societies are mainly focused on protecting and perpetuating the interests of the oligarchs while neglecting the economic growth and development that is vital in the prosperity of the country masses.
• Jonathan Prude: Capitalism, Industrialization, Factory The aspects of historical industrialization were based on rural capitalism of the North-West regions and the co-existence of nonprofit factories along with private properties makes it difficult to understand the milieu of the factory of […]
• Slave Trade and Rise of Capitalism Others consider the presence of capitalism to be the root of the slave trade as humans were in the earlier times viewed as factors of production similar to the current labor factor but different in […]
• The American Capitalism and Technological Progress So, the first reason for the American Revolution to begin was a very strict policy of the British Empire towards colonies, particularly, the restriction of commerce to the limits of internal trade; the colonies should […]
• Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” Documentary The results of the research are deplorable, because the rate of unemployed people increases every day, people have nothing to pay for their homes, insurances, and education. Is it possible to make fortune in the […]
• “Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy” by E. Luttwak Consequently, the thesis of the book may be formulated in the following way: human society should beware of the present state of capitalism, turbo-capitalism, which can bring very harmful results of its existence that will […]
• Capitalism History: Ancient and Modern Capitalism During the 1st century, the double currency was stable and towards the end of 2nd century, the denars equivalent to gold started to rise.
• Capitalism and Industrialization in the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx In fact, the Communist Manifesto is clear in indicating that industrialization was a process that led to the overall improvement of society in doing away with the hardships of the majority of the population.
• How Best To Ensure US-Style Global Capitalism This research work aims to analyze the peculiarities of global capitalism and the impact that the United States has on other nations.
• Boltanski and Chapello: New Spirit of Capitalism Analysis For example, in their book, Boltanski and Chapello describe the new paradigm of production to be one of the forms of workers’ exploitation.
• Human Rights in the Disaster Capitalism Context By the word human rights, it is generally meant to be the protection of individual rights against the encroachment by the state and it also means the basic rights and freedom of individuals.
• The Concept of Capitalism in China In actual by capitalist state Chinese dreamt of living a life style free of bureaucracy so that they may be able to offend their sense of pride and demean the life-style of the workers’ families.
• Capitalism and Industrialization as a Cause of AIDS Spread Population growth rates are the highest in most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America due to the high degree of fertility and the dramatic decrease in mortality following World War II.
• Capitalism: Competitional Free Trade This essay will try to highlight the first problem area of Competition and Free Trade, what some of the known authors had to say about the effect of capitalism on it, and finally the overall […]
• The Synergy Between Capitalism and Democracy Democracy and its success: Democracy refers to a political system in which the political part of the government is elected through adult suffrage.
• Great War & Liberal Capitalism in Russia, Germany, Italy The history of capitalism has for long term highlighted the basis of reference on the impact of material prosperity and the overall view on the economy in the context of time and region.
• Capitalism, Individualism, and Social Responsibility This has largely been attributed to the regulation of modern societies by the state, the localization of the life-worlds, and the crisis of the subject in the post modernist culture of intellectuals.
• Capitalist System in America The market forces of demand and supply determine the prices of goods and services without the interference of the government. The capitalist argues that the government must protect its citizens who are the production units […]
• Does American Capitalism Allow Social Mobility? Sometimes, this process is called the distribution of talent, even though ratio can not be perfect, the more close it is to the ideal, the better principle of justice is applied in the society.
• The Result of Western Capitalism Fueling Communism The paper starts with the history of China and elucidates the entry of western capitalism into China in different stages, including the historic opium wars.
• Financial System, Financial Markets and Understanding of Capitalism in Germany and the U.S. The reason for this has been primarily identified as to the experiences and the events the countries have had to face in the past century.
• A. Smith and K. Marx: Contrasting Views of Capitalism One important aspect of society that helps balance the needs and wants of the people is Economics, the social science that deals with goods and services.
• Urban Democracy and Capitalism For example, surveys show that people increasingly identify with the planetary scale, the local scale, and a whole series of spaces in between.
• Supermarkets. The Machinery of Capitalism Even the meat, which is placed in the market, seems to be losing the imprints of nature, as it is boneless and entirely processed out of human hands.
• Capitalist Modernity After Feudal Mode The division of labor contributed immensely to the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. Both lords and peasants sought to participate in the trade as a way of accessing markets for their products.
• Environmental Sociology. Capitalism and the Environment Some evident examples of remarkable economic development in modern capitalism encompass the enormous industrial development of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the outstanding development levels of Western Europe, the emergence of East Asian […]
• Population Pressure, Surplus Population, Nature, and Capitalist Development While a section of the society has more than they can consume in several generations, others are starving because of a system that favours only a section of the society.
• American Individualism vs. Capitalism Norms However, a large number of people would agree that the possibility to satisfy one’s basic needs is one of the constituents of contentment.
• Reciprocity in the Capitalist Workforce Thirdly, the majority of companies have failed to implement the policy of employee engagement despite the fact that the requirements are quite common and easy to follow.[1] All of these factors separately or in a […]
• Profit and Capitalism on the Facebook Example Milton and Friedman’s school of thought discusses the power of the market in the sense that the majority of economic fallacies are driven by the lack of attention to simple insight and the tendency to […]
• Race and Ethnicity: Capitalism, Law, and Biology Stemming from the bigoted perspective that the colonialist thinking provided, legal regulations and biological theories have aggravated the quality of relationships between members of different racial and ethnic groups, creating the scenario in which the […]

📌 Hot Capitalism Topics to Write about

• “The People’s Republic of Capitalism” Documentary The central themes of The People’s Republic of Capitalism are the intricacies of the Chinese experiment with capitalism restrained by the authoritarian government and interdependence of American and Chinese economies.
• Economics: Socialism vs. Liberal Capitalism Karl Marx, a great proponent of socialism, refers to the ethical, economic, and political contribution of socialism to the welfare of the society in asserting his position on the debate of the best economic model.
• Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch” and Capitalism The main thesis of the book is multilayered and addresses the development of capitalism and the role women, as well as violence, played in the process.
• Weber’s “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” Much of the book focuses on the concept of capitalism as witnessed in northern Europe and the United States of America due to the influence of the Protestants.
• David Harvey’s Movie “Crises of Capitalism?” According to the opinion of the expert, the problem is that every system has some risks and the crises that society is experiencing today are the result of how the conflicts were managed and mitigated […]
• 2008 Global Financial Crisis: Crises of Capitalism? Although I had an idea of the possible catalysts of the 2008 global financial meltdown before watching the video, Harvey presented a clear report of the events that occurred before the crisis and put them […]
• Economics: Episode 6 of “Capitalism” Documentary In the meantime, while Keynes simply rejects the potential of the invisible hand of the market, Polanyi develops this idea and comes to a conclusion that the liberalistic attempt to establish the self-regulating market system […]
• Economics: Episode 5 of “Capitalism” Documentary The pivot point of the Hayek’s theory is the consideration of those factors that illustrate the market’s failure to coordinate human’s actions in an appropriate manner and the consequences of this failure such as unemployment.
• Astrology in Socialist, Capitalist, Psychological Views The fact that many people overlook what astrologers do or say has resulted in the unavailability of information in the area of study.
• The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber At the time of producing the document, society expected its people to believe in something. The sociologist used the concept of Ascetic Protestantism to investigate the origin and nature of capitalism.
• Chapters 4-6 of “After Capitalism” by D. Schweickart Also, the act of democracy does not seem to have any place in such a system since individuals who are wealthy take over the control of every process.
• Chapters 1-3 of “After Capitalism” by Schweickart According to the author, moral and pragmatic failures of capitalism are vividly evident in the modern world. In order to comprehend these lessons, it is necessary to compare and contrast socialism both in the 20th […]
• Economy of Capitalism, Communism, Fascism and Socialism Government structure: the structure of the government in the two countries, involves federal governments that are led by the political elites in the countries. The government has the duty of formulating policies that regulate the […]
• “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman In turn, the competition will be one of the factors that can improve the quality of education. Moreover, the increased competition can make school administrators more responsive to the suggestions and critique of parents who […]
• “State Capitalism Comes of Age” by Ian Bremmer Thus, Bremmer concentrates on the discussion of the opposition of the models realized in such countries as Russia, China, Brazil, and India with basing on the principles of state capitalism and the model of free […]
• Capitalism System: David Harvey’s View David Harvey tries to convince the viewers that capitalism is a horrible system that leads humanity to self-destruction on a global scale.
• Capitalism Problem: Video Analysis However, the lack of resources and their disproportionate distribution will inevitably lead to a serious crisis. Admittedly, people’s nature will not change, and many people will not want to build a fair society where resources […]
• Labor Market, Social Organizations and Wages in Capitalism Therefore, employers are forced to pay efficiency wages to increase work intensity and the cost of job loss. The intention is to reduce wages as employees are pressurized to work harder and to the extreme.
• Socialist vs. Capitalist Approach to Social Issues Capitalism also refers to a system where the economy is independent of the state. In a Socialist economy, the intellectual property belongs to the government.
• “Redeeming Capitalism” by Kenneth J. Barnes With such gaps, the central thesis of the text is that there is a need for the global society to combine aspects of morality and ethics with modern capitalism and ensure that it meets the […]
• Capitalism in Poland and Its Transitional Stage The decades of socialism had a significant impact on the transition countries and resulted in the lack of institutions involved in the provision of the functioning of a market economy.
• Protestantism, Capitalism, and Predestination Calvinism and Predestination are central to the book because Weber considers the actions and beliefs of Calvinists as two of the major factors in the development of capitalism.
• Saving Capitalism: Its Role in Modern World This type of economic structure is called capitalistic, and one of its central conditions is the right to private property and free trade within the limits of the norms established by the law.
• Eduardo Porter’s Views on Capitalism In the meantime, the latest change in the economic trends shows that the economist’s expectations were inflated as well as the potential that he assigned to the free market turned out to be exaggerated.
• The Destructive Nature of Capitalism The author emphasizes the tendency in the modern popular culture to humanize the technological aspects of our lives, probably in order to compensate for the exacerbated violence and a lack of compassion that human beings […]
• Poverty: An Echo of Capitalism Poverty is a word that has always been a part of people’s lives at different stages of the development of human society. Relative poverty is often defined as the lack of material resources needed to […]
• The Dutch Republic and Capitalism The production of silk brought by merchants from China to Italy and Turkey is an excellent example of the influence that merchants had during that time period.
• Capitalism in Milanovic’s and Ferguson’s Views Other economists establish that there is a need for the government to intervene to avoid the risk of monopolies. The question of wages in labor also calls for the intervention of the government to make […]
• Nature, Technology, Society, and Capitalism For the majority of human history, the approach towards the relationship between Humanity and Nature was perceived through the lens of binary interactions.
• Division of Labor: Aspects of Capitalism The paper then focuses on the differences between the social division of labor and the detailed division of labor. It is important to look at the difference between the social division of labor and the […]
• Capitalism in Marx’s, Weber’s, Durkheim’s Theories Conceptualizing change as a feature of social modernity using analogies such as growth, cyclical renewal, progress, modernity, development, and evolution gives us presuppositions for understanding the world and the concept of individual, society, and culture. […]
• Russia’s Transition to Capitalism First, lack of a robust system of property rights was the greatest drawback to the successful implementation of the transition policies. Russia experienced the assassination of famous economists and lawyers that advocated the transition from […]
• The Development of Capitalism in Canada To begin with, Pentland states that by the middle of the nineteenth century there were a plenty of signs indicating that the changes of the course of the economy “had gone too far to be […]
• Society, Culture, Economy in “Capitalism” Mini-Series While certain points, such as the historical, sociological, and anthropological grounds for the Smith’s work are persuasive and present a solid basis for further inquiry, some of the conclusions, such as the inherent malevolence of […]
• Capitalism and Its Influence on Globalization
• “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Weber
• Capitalism in Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s Views
• Globalization, Art and Capitalism
• Karl Marx: Critique of Capitalism
• Varieties of Capitalism – Comparative Advantages
• Shared Value Capitalism by Porter and Kramer
• Capitalism and Just Eat It Documentaries Contrast
• Capitalism in the US: Criticism and Alternative
• Globalization and Its Impact on Capitalism
• Documentaries – Capitalism: A Love Story by Michael Moore
• Capitalism Spirit and the Protestant Ethic
• Capitalism in Canadian Society
• History Fukuzawa Yukishi: From Samurai to Capitalist
• Economic Issues in “Capitalism” by Joan Robinson
• Marxist Critique of Capitalism: Expropriation of Surplus Value
• Clean Capitalism in Organizations
• Weber and the Rise of Capitalism
• Natural Capitalism in Economic
• Relationship Between Capitalism and a Logically Formal Rational Legal System
• Marxist Critiques of Capitalism: Theory of Surplus Value
• Socialist Market Economy of China Shift Toward Capitalism
• Robert Brenner on the Development of Capitalism
• Biggart and Swedberg Views on Capitalist Development
• Capitalism and Colonialism
• The Transition of Russia to Capitalism
• Capitalism: Theoretical and Operational Limitations
• The Role of Capitalism and the Life of Workers: XX Century
• Global Capitalism and Its Discontent
• An Invisible Hand of Capitalism in the Business
• Market Structure during Post-Mao China: Capitalism or Socialism?
• Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Dynamic Capitalism
• Marxists’ Critique of Crises With the Capitalist System
• Capitalism, Democracy and the Treaty of Waitangi are Three Ways Through Which We in Aotearoa ‘Organise’ Ourselves
• Taxes, Capitalism, and Democracy: Karl Marx vs. Plato
• Racial Capitalism and Colonialism
• Racial Capitalism and Colonialism in African Diasporic Culture and Western Culture
• Capitalist Societies Economic Disparities
• How Is Today’s Capitalism Society Changed by the “New Left?”
• Video Report “China’s Capitalist Revolution”
• Capitalism in Modern Societies
• The Political and Economic Spheres in Capitalist Societies
• The Global Financial Crisis and Capitalism for the Elite Rich
• David Harvey About Capitalism
• Weber’s Ideal Type of the Spirit of Capitalism
• Understanding Economics: The Nature and Logic of Capitalism
• Richard Sennett’s Account of the ‘New Capitalism’ in Relation to Current Organizations
• Labor in Capitalism System
• Economic Principles and Theories of Adam Smith: A Case for Free Markets and Capitalism
• Capitalism and World Inequality
• Weber’s Conception of the Capitalist Entrepreneur and the Modern Bureaucrat
• Capitalism Concept Evolution
• British Capitalism Development
• Capitalist Economy Support
• John Gray: Fast Capitalism and the End of Management
• Running Economies: Capitalism and Socialism
• Capitalist Economies in the US
• Scholars on the Effects of Capitalism
• Political Ideologies: Capitalism vs. Socialism
• Adam Smith’s Understanding of Capitalism
• Can Capitalism Be Ethical?
• Capitalism and Its Role in Commodity Exchange and Value
• Capitalism and Poverty
• Karl Marx: From Feudal Society to Modern Capitalism
• Compare of Capitalism and Socialism
• Capitalism: A Love Story: A Reflective Paper
• Development of the Atlantic Trade Triangle a Colonial Capitalism (Mercantilism)
• How Capitalism Beat Communism/Socialism
• Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Weber
• US Economic Success: Rise of Capitalism
• Forced Labor and Free Enterprise on Sugar Plantations Created a Feudal and Capitalism Society

❓ Capitalism Research Paper Topics

• Why Has Liberal Capitalism Failed To Stimulate a Democratic Culture in Africa?
• What Is the Connection Between Capitalism and Modern Culture?
• How Government Policies Affected Global Capitalism?
• What Are the Positive and Negative Outcomes of Market Capitalism?
• How Does Capitalism Differ From Socialism?
• What Is the Connection Between Slavery, the Rise of Capitalism, and Colonization?
• What Is the Relationship Between Race and Capitalism?
• How Does Modern Capitalism Looks Like?
• Will Global Capitalism Fall Again?
• What Is the Relationship Between Capitalism and Democracy?
• How Capitalism Contributes Towards Unemployment?
• What Is the Difference and Similarity Between Socialism and Capitalism?
• How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK?
• Why Doesn’t Capitalism Flow to Poor Countries?
• How Does Capitalism Affect Population Growth?
• Did the New Deal Strengthen or Weakened the USA Capitalism?
• How Has the Rise of Capitalism Contributed to the Persistent Gender Inequity?
• How Can Capitalism Take Control of People’s Lives?
• What Is the Conflict Between Socialism and Capitalism?
• What Can Marx’s Work on Capitalism Tell Us About Modernity?
• How Does the Spirit of Capitalism Affect Stock Market Prices?
• How Capitalism and the Bourgeois Virtues Transformed and Humanized the Family?
• Who Are Capitalists and What Is Capitalism?
• How Does the Capitalism Influence the Debt of Developing Countries?
• Why Does Market Capitalism Fail To Deliver a Sustainable Environment and Greater Equality of Incomes?
• How Can Capitalism Save American Healthcare?
• How Slavery Shifted the Economy Towards Capitalism?
• How Has the Internet Changed Modern-Day Capitalism?
• Why China Chose the Socialism Instead of Capitalism as the Country Political System When Prc Was Established?
• How Capitalism Thwarts Creativity?
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187 Capitalism Essay Topics

🏆 best essay topics on capitalism, ✍️ capitalism essay topics for college, 👍 good capitalism research topics & essay examples, 🔥 hot capitalism ideas to write about, 🎓 most interesting capitalism research titles, 💡 simple capitalism essay ideas, 📌 easy capitalism essay topics, ❓ research questions about capitalism.

• Marx vs. Weber: Capitalism – Compare and Contrast Essay
• Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• Why Capitalism is Better Than Socialism
• Strengths and Weaknesses of the Theories of Capitalist Imperialism Proposed by Hobson-Lenin
• East Asian Capitalism and Its History
• Capitalism vs. Socialism: Comparing and Contrasting
• Conscious Capitalism and Fair Trade
• Division of Labor in the Context of Capitalism This paper discusses labor division in the context of capitalism and productivity and provides a real-life example.
• Deleuze’s “A Thousand Plateaus” and Guattari’s “Capitalism and Schizophrenia” The book “A Thousand Plateaus” written by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari is the second part of the project “Capitalism and Schizophrenia”.
• “Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not a Problem” by Jay Richards In his book “Money, Greed, and God,” Jay Richards, an American analytical philosopher, seeks to address the most common myths about capitalism.
• Weber’s and Marx’s Views on Capitalism Comparison The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast political theories and highlight similarities and differences between Marx and Weber.
• Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism This paper will examine the key ideas of Marx regarding class division, labor, ideology, and fetishism of commodities in the context of capitalism.
• Poverty and Capitalism in Trash by Dorothy Allison The paper discusses the book titled Trash, author Dorothy Allison. It features the struggles of a violent survivor from a poverty-stricken family.
• Capitalism and Democracy: The Problem of Coexistence The paper examines whether the coexistence of capitalism and democracy provides mutual benefits or enforces detremial mechanisms that strain the relationship between these forces.
• The Industrial Age Impact and the Rise of Capitalism The project focuses on defining the key characteristics of the Industrial Age and analyzing their impact on the worldview of modern people in developed countries.
• Avant-Garde Art, Urban Capitalism and Modernization The avant-garde artists provided experimental and innovative arts, which transformed the social, cultural, economic, and political aspects of society.
• Whole Foods Market Inc.’s Conscious Capitalism Whole Foods Market Inc. is an American chain of supermarkets. The paper describes Whole Foods in terms of its practice of conscious capitalism.
• Why Capitalism Is Superior to Socialism The comparison of the two economic systems is rather complex and involves many aspects, but various facts and numbers are showing the superiority of capitalism over socialism.
• Capitalism, Climate Change, and Globalization Globalization allowed significant corporations to put a substantial strain on the environment in developing countries.
• Inheritance in Capitalism and Ethical Grid Society still goes ahead to praise those who seem to have amassed a lot of wealth for their future generations.
• Capitalism and Gay Identity by D’Emilio and Berube In this paper, the author will review the link between gay identity and capitalism from the perspective of two essays written by D’Emilio and Berube.
• Globalization: Climate Crisis and Capitalist Ideology One of the main features of the development of the world community in recent decades has been globalization as part of integration processes that are changing the world structure.
• Population, Consumerism and Capitalism The author analyzes examines the joint impact of population, consumerism and capitalism on the economy and on the environment.
• The Industrial Age and Capitalism: Key Features and Impacts on Society Capitalism can largely contribute to the deterioration of interpersonal connections in communities and lead to the overall worsening of the quality of life in the long run.
• Capitalist Modernity in the 19th and the 20th Century This essay examines the problems, discomforts, benefits and drawbacks created by capitalist modernity in the 19th and the 20th century and its impact on the human society.
• Zuboff’s “Surveillance Capitalism” and Hiring Bias The paper explains what Zuboff means by surveillance capitalism, and how this concept could be used to understand problems like information pollution and hiring bias.
• Capitalism vs. Socialism: Principles and Arguments The rhetorical argument is effective because another claim is the statement about fair distribution based on the market mechanism.
• Economic Systems: Attitude to Work in Capitalism Capitalism highly contributes to the “I-don’t-care” attitude among workers because workers’ duty is to produce more products without concern for their welfare.
• Capitalism and Socialism Systems’ Morality The paper focuses on the capitalistic views as more moral due to the opportunities for individual freedom and open markets that support the development of society.
• Capitalism and Socialism in the Marxist School of Thought The Marxist school of thought claims that capitalism would ultimately evolve into socialism in the same manner that feudalism had developed into capitalism.
• Social Classes and Capitalism: Sociological Theories This article focuses on the ideas of capitalism based on social classes while describing the concepts of perspective, conflict, symbolic interaction, and functionalism.
• “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” by Max Weber In his work “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, Max Weber gives his ethical views on the protestant religion and its contribution to capitalism.
• Raciolinguistic Ideology: Language, Capitalism, Colonialism Raciolinguistic ideology was born from European colonialism, and it suggests that language and race are correlated.
• Capitalism: History and Basics Capitalism represents the dominant economic concept in modern reality, based on private property, the competence of actors, and the principle of supply and demand.
• Capitalism as a Means of Promoting Inequality The degree to which capitalism has impacted the distribution of wealth and opportunities in society has shaped the course of events in the world.
• The Essay “Capitalism and Freedom” by Milton Friedman While ‘some’ time has passed since 1962, Milton Friedman’s essay titled “Capitalism and Freedom” remains relevant to this day.
• Surveillance Capitalism in Shoshana Zuboff’s View Surveillance capitalism is different from information capitalism in that it is based on the commodification of behavioral analysis.
• Church’s Responses to Development of Capitalism This paper analyzes different reactions of the Christian society to the Industrial revolution and defines which is the most consistent with Biblical Scripture.
• Disconnectedness of Political Freedom and Capitalism The paper is about the disconnectedness of political freedom and capitalism, which indicates that the latter does not promote or guarantee the former.
• Contemporary Racial Capitalism in Flint The research shows the poor living standards in Flint, which the author attributes to the deliberate negative activities of the administration.
• Marx’s Objections to Capitalism This essay describes and evaluates Marx’s three main objections to capitalism and criticizes them on the grounds of his underestimation of capitalism’s creative force.
• “Modern Capitalism Needs a Revolution…” by Cohen The social and climatic consequences caused by people’s desire to produce more and more unnecessary goods become so devastating that humanity cannot cope with them.
• Capitalism and Religion: Sociological Perspective In sociological tradition, such scholars as Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber are the most prominent researchers of religion’s role in society.
• The Market Economy and Capitalism The choice of an economic model is determined by the nation’s economic state and governmental influences. Market economies are characterized by demand and supply forces.
• Christian Business Operation in Capitalism Although some Christians agree with the fundamentals of capitalism, other Christian theologians propose different economic strategies that best represent Christian traditions.
• Capitalism as a Form of Social Competition This paper aims to describe the thesis that capitalism drives society toward competition and rivalry with the help of scholarly literature and real-life examples.
• Conscious Capitalism: Marketing Plan Actions The intensity of the market competitiveness is reduced by the company’s deliberate focus on recreation and speed as key features of its products.
• Marxian Alienation in Modern Capitalist Countries This paper aims at answering a more specific version of this question – “is Marxian alienation present in modern capitalist societies?”
• Small Business in an Ideal Capitalist Economy The purpose of this piece of work is to examine the process and includes activities of small businesses ownership in ideal capitalism and evaluate the possible sides of the concept.
• Capitalism in Business and Modern World With all the criticism it receives, capitalism has played a key role in many of the humaachievests, including technology, science, and culture.
• Capitalism in Brook’s Vermeer’s Hat and Rediker’s Slave Ship This essay comprises a comparison of Brook’s and Rediker’s depiction of how global capitalism was perpetuated in a social, political, and economic context.
• Alienated Labor in Capitalist Societies The alienation of labor is an integral part of capitalist society since it is built on producing and exchanging goods.
• Universal Health Care Under Free-Market Capitalism During the last centuries, certain attempts were made to stabilize healthcare services and choose between universal and single-payer care types.
• The Theory of Capitalism: Hayek’s Arguments Friedrich Hayek strove to defend traditional concepts of morality in economics and fought the progressive representatives of the new era who sought to destroy the classical canons.
• The Superiority of Socialism Over Capitalism In the capitalist environment, which leaves large corporations to dominate the economic discourse, the planning process becomes disrupted and starts lacking homogeneity.
• Conscious Capitalism Description: Humanity and Business Conscious capitalism or marketing is gaining popularity as companies seek to embrace compassion in their business ventures.
• Crumbling American Dream: The Thrive of Capitalism The notion of the American dream has now become a universal matter. The thrive of capitalism has made the American dream a desirable state of things unachievable in the near future.
• Rhetorical Analysis: Capitalism and Socialism Both systems have their flaws, but capitalism is more practical and efficient in bringing prosperity and reducing scarcity, which means that it is better.
• The Impact of the Industrial Age and the Rise of Capitalism The definition of the key features of the industrial epoch and the early capitalism would help discuss them in relation to modern times and values.
• Capitalism and Socialism, Democracy This kind of system is illustrated by having recognized equality rights and freedom both in a social setting and political locale.
• Understanding Economics: Definition of the Capitalism Wealth creation in a capitalist system relies on private ownership of property. Individuals are given the freedom to own and control the property.
• Authoritarian Capitalism and Western Liberal Version This paper supports authoritarianism for economic development as compared to a democratic system. It mostly examines a state that advocates for the authoritarian regime.
• Democratic Capitalism and Morality in America The problem of the level of the salary in the modern world remains core in economics in the condition of the free market.
• Marx’s Criticism of Capitalism and Sociological Theory This paper tells about Marx who contributed to sociological theory by linking the economic structure of the society and how it affected social interactions.
• Democratic Capitalism and Individual Liberty Democratic capitalism is the economic and political system based on individuals’ potentials in an environment of cooperation and trust.
• Social, Technical, Economic and Ideological Factors of a Capitalist Economy Capitalism has been defined as that economic system that that allows both wealth as well as its production means to be controlled and owned privately.
• Marx’s and Weber’s Opposing Views of Capitalism Weber is among the profound critics of Marxist ideologies. They have opposing views on the issue of capitalism even though they share some similarities on the same topic.
• US Capitalism. William Leach’s “Land of Desire” William Leach’s “Land of Desire” is concerned with exploring the development of consumer capitalism in the US between 1890 and 1932.
• The Industrial Age and Capitalism Industrial Age can be defined as the time when people became actively engaged in the development of manufacturing machinery.
• Capitalism and Its Benefits to the Public Goods The basis of capitalism is the freedom of economic activity of individuals within the state, which provides protection, justice, and order for the functioning of the system by political power.
• Socialism as an Alternative to Capitalism in the United States This report seeks to evaluate socialism as an alternative to capitalism as the primary economic system of the United States and present viable solutions to the issue.
• Public Capitalism in Promoting the Common Good Capitalism is both an economic and political system in which the financial market, production, and concepts of private ownership are driving factors for operation and success.
• Capitalism: Benefiting the Public Good In the purest form of capitalism, which is a laissez-faire economy, power is concentrated in the hands of private individuals or businesses that own capital goods.
• “Freedom and Capitalism” by Milton Friedman The principle behind the book “Capitalism and Freedom” was that the government only existed for the will of the people, and thus served as the means towards a goal.
• The Industrial Revolution & the Rise of Capitalism The Industrial Age and early capitalism have made a significant contribution to the perceptions of wealth and business. This paper discusses this theme in presentation style.
• Friedman’s Free Market Capitalism A free market economy is a system in which the prices of goods and services are determined purely by the demand and supply in the market.
• Capitalism in “Out of This Furnace” by Thomas Bell This paper is intended to discuss the structure and general ideas of capitalism based on the phrase of the main character of the book “Out of This Furnace” by Thomas Bell.
• Exploitation and Profit in Capitalism Although the exploitation of people by other people has always existed, the capitalist rule has transformed this practice into something unique and to some degree acceptable.
• Industrial Age and Early Capitalism The Industrial Age and early capitalism have made a significant contribution to the perceptions of wealth and business in contemporary society.
• The Vision of Capitalism: Adam Smith vs Karl Marx Comparing Smith’s vision of the impact of the capitalist economy to that of Marx, it can be claimed that the former offers a more positive evaluation of the relevant outcomes.
• Work Motivation: Capitalism, Individualism, Institutionalism The reasons why people work can be found in Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The key constituents are calling, predestination, and asceticism.
• The Status of Capitalism in Communist China In the current paper, the author reviews some of the important factors needed for a capitalist economy to produce wealth. The discussion will be made in relation to DeSoto’s arguments.
• The Role of Markets and the State in Different Approaches to Understanding a Capitalist Economy Capitalism is an economic policy used by the government aimed at minimal participation in production. This paper looks into issues associated with capitalism.
• Consecrating Capitalism: The United States Prosperity Gospel and Neoliberalism
• Capital Ownership via Capitalism: Main Features and Differences
• Knowledge Capitalism: Business, Work, and Learning in the New Economy
• Capitalism’s Anglo-American Model and the German Economic Alternative
• Industrial Production and Capitalism Drivers of Social Change in History
• Investor Capitalism and the Reshaping of Business in India
• How Did Communism and Capitalism Lead To the Cold War?
• Europe and the Economic Crisis: Forms of Labour Market Adjustment and Varieties of Capitalism
• How Does Shared Capitalism Affect Economic Performance in the UK
• Understanding Capitalism: Competition, Command, and Change
• Cooperative Capitalism: Self-Regulation, Trade Associations, and the Antimonopoly Law in Japan
• Capitalism, Socialism and the Mixed Economic System Compared
• Corporate Islam, Global Capitalism and the Performance of Economic Moralities
• Criminal Justice System, Capitalism, and Victimization
• Free Marxism, Global Capitalism and the Human Being as a Commodity
• Global Capitalism and Imperialism Theory: Methodological and Substantive Insights From Rosa Luxemburg
• State-Monopoly Capitalism and Bourgeois Political Economy
• How Does the Spirit of Capitalism Affect Stock Market Prices in a Small-Open Economy
• Making Capitalism Work: Social Capital and Economic Growth in Italy, 1970-1995
• The Link Between State Making and Mercantile Capitalism
• Cutthroat Capitalism Versus Cuddly Socialism: Are Americans More Meritocratic and Efficiency-Seeking Than Scandinavians
• The Link Between Colombia’s Capitalism and Drug Trade
• Workplace Relations, Unemployment, and Finance-Dominated Capitalism
• Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare, and Labour: The Common fare Hypothesis
• Finance Capitalism and Germany’s Rise to Industrial Power
• Max Weber and Karl Marx on Modern Capitalism
• Wealth and Inequality Over Eight Centuries of British Capitalism
• Globalization and the Contradiction of Peripheral Capitalism in Nigeria
• Why Does Marx Believe That Capitalism Will Inevitably Give Way to Socialism?
• When Managerial Capitalism Embraced Shareholder-Value Ideology?
• Imperialism and Colonialism Are Obstacles to Global Capitalism
• Capitalism Was Behind American Colonization of Puerto
• Capitalism Dominates the Way How Human’s Acquire Goods and Wealth
• Corporate Social Responsibility and Crony Capitalism in Taiwan
• Why Inheritance Undermines Capitalism?
• The Role of Deng Xiaoping and the Origins of Chinese Capitalism
• The Truth Behind the Political System of Capitalism in the United States
• The Vanishing Hand: The Changing Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
• Capitalism, Globalization and the Perpetuation of Women’s Oppression: A Vicious Cycle
• The Global Financial Crisis, Neoclassical Economics, and the Neoliberal Years of Capitalism
• Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom: A Binary Economic Critique
• Class System and Alienation Under Capitalism According to Karl Marx
• The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-Of-The-Century New York and New Orleans
• Municipal Capitalism, Regulatory Federalism and Politics
• The Relationships Between Capitalism, Colonialism and the Libratory Struggles
• Capitalist Transformation Without Political Participation: German Capitalism in the First Half of the 19th Century
• Civilizing Capitalism: “Good” and “Bad” Greed From the Enlightenment to Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)
• How Capitalism, University, and Mathematics as Institutions Shaped Mainstream Economics
• Capitalism and Patriarchy Effect on Woman Abuse
• Unregulated Capitalism Undermines the Legitimacy of Liberal Democracy
• Colonial Capitalism: Changing Cultures and Lives
• How Sweet Capitalism Has Risen in Great Britain?
• Corporative Capitalism: Civil Society and the Politics of Accumulation in Small Town India
• The Trade-off Between Capitalism and Democracy in a Historical Perspective
• The Causes and Effects of the Cold War Between Communism and Capitalism
• Learning Capitalism the Hard Way – Evidence From German Reunification
• The History and Impact of the Free Market System or Capitalism in the United States
• Capitalism and Western Philosophy Have Taken the World by Storm
• Re-Imaging Capitalism Through Social Entrepreneurship
• Vietnam War: The Product of Capitalism and Communism
• European Monetary Integration and the Incompatibility of National Varieties of Capitalism
• Entrepreneurship and the Defense of Capitalism: An Examination of the Work of Israel Kirzner
• Coordination and Organization: The Two Dimensions of Nonliberal Capitalism
• Does Karl Marx’s Critique of Capitalism Rest on a Fallacious Philosophy of History
• Differentiate Laissez-Faire Capitalism From State-Directed Capitalism
• The Nature and Functioning of European Capitalism: A Historical and Comparative Perspective
• Modern Capitalism: Its Origin and Evolution
• Welfare Over Time: Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in Panel Perspective
• Why Does Market Capitalism Fail to Deliver a Sustainable Environment and Greater Equality of Incomes?
• The Differences Between Capitalism vs. Socialism
• The Contradiction Between Capitalism and Democracy in the United States
• What Can Marx’s Work on Capitalism Tell Us About Modernity?
• Capitalism, the State, and the Underlying Drivers of Human Development
• Slovenia’s Transition From Labor Managed Economy to Privately Owned Capitalism
• Are Democracy and Capitalism Compatible?
• Did John Maynard Keynes Save or Destroy Capitalism?
• How Does Capitalism Contribute Towards Unemployment?
• Why Did Karl Marx Condemn Capitalism?
• Does Capitalism Destroy Culture?
• How Did the Successive Stages of Capitalism Change the UK’s Accounting and Financial Reporting Processes?
• Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?
• What Does Advertisement Tell Us About America Before and After Capitalism?
• Did the New Deal Weaken or Strengthen Capitalism in the US?
• Has Capitalism Lifted Billions Out of Poverty?
• How Has the Internet Changed Modern-Day Capitalism?
• What Caused the Clash Between Communism and Capitalism During the Cold War?
• How Did Government Policies Affect Global Capitalism?
• Does Global Capitalism Mean Free Trade?
• Why Has Liberal Capitalism Failed to Stimulate a Democratic Culture in Africa?
• Are Managerial Capitalism and Crony Capitalism Incompatible?
• Did the Progressive Reform Substantially Restrain the Power of American Capitalism?
• Can the BRICS Help Global Capitalism Escape Its Crisis?
• Why Did Marx Believe That Capitalism Is Destined to Self-Destruction?
• Does Capitalism Maximize Human Well-Being?
• How Does Capitalism Differ From Socialism and Communism?
• Does Capitalism Promote Social Inequality?
• Is Capitalism Good for Poor Countries?
• Has Socialism Been Defeated by Capitalism?
• Did Marx Condemn Capitalism as Unjust?
• How Can Capitalism Take Control of People’s Lives?
• Why Did Early Capitalism Benefit the Majority?
• Does the Current Financial Crisis Mean the Crisis of Liberal Capitalism?
• How Does Capitalism Influence the Debt of Developing Countries?
• Did the USSR Really Benefit From Its Transition to Capitalism?

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123 Capitalism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Capitalism is an economic system that has been widely adopted across the globe. It promotes private ownership, free markets, and competition as the driving forces behind economic growth. As a complex and dynamic system, capitalism offers a plethora of research topics for students and scholars. In this article, we present 123 capitalism essay topic ideas and examples to inspire and guide your research.

• The history and evolution of capitalism: From its origins to the present day.
• Capitalism vs. socialism: A comparative analysis of economic systems.
• The impact of capitalism on income inequality.
• The role of entrepreneurship in capitalism.
• Capitalism and consumer culture: How advertising shapes our desires.
• The relationship between capitalism and democracy.
• The role of multinational corporations in capitalism.
• Capitalism and globalization: Opportunities and challenges.
• The impact of capitalism on the environment.
• Capitalism and technological innovation: A symbiotic relationship?
• Capitalism and the gig economy: Pros and cons for workers.
• The role of government regulation in a capitalist society.
• Capitalism and social mobility: Is it a myth?
• Capitalism and the welfare state: Balancing economic growth and social protection.
• The role of financial markets in capitalism.
• The influence of economic recessions on capitalism.
• The impact of capitalism on gender equality.
• Capitalism and the healthcare industry: Pros and cons.
• Capitalism and education: The commodification of knowledge.
• The role of intellectual property rights in capitalism.
• Capitalism and income mobility: Can anyone achieve the American Dream?
• Capitalism and poverty: Can the market system alleviate or exacerbate it?
• The impact of capitalism on the arts and culture.
• Capitalism and philanthropy: The role of wealthy individuals and corporations.
• The relationship between capitalism and social unrest.
• The impact of capitalism on worker rights and labor conditions.
• Capitalism and the housing market: Affordable housing and gentrification.
• The influence of capitalism on political ideologies.
• Capitalism and economic imperialism: The impact on developing countries.
• The role of capitalism in technological advancements in healthcare.
• Capitalism and income taxation: Progressive or regressive?
• The impact of capitalism on mental health and well-being.
• Capitalism and the media industry: Concentration of ownership and its consequences.
• The relationship between capitalism and innovation in renewable energy.
• Capitalism and the pharmaceutical industry: Drug pricing and access.
• The role of capitalism in shaping economic policies.
• Capitalism and economic bubbles: Causes and consequences.
• The impact of capitalism on indigenous communities.
• Capitalism and the gig economy: The rise of platform capitalism.
• The role of capitalism in shaping urban development.
• Capitalism and artificial intelligence: Opportunities and risks.
• The influence of capitalism on the criminal justice system.
• Capitalism and economic inequality in developing countries.
• The impact of capitalism on worker alienation.
• Capitalism and corporate social responsibility: Genuine commitment or mere PR?
• The role of capitalism in shaping trade policies and international relations.
• Capitalism and the rise of the sharing economy.
• The influence of capitalism on the education gap between rural and urban areas.
• Capitalism and the prison-industrial complex: Profit-driven incarceration.
• The impact of capitalism on food production and distribution.
• Capitalism and the rise of the gig economy in developing countries.
• The role of capitalism in the financialization of the economy.
• Capitalism and the impact of automation on employment.
• The influence of capitalism on the cost of higher education.
• Capitalism and income inequality in developed countries.
• The impact of capitalism on worker solidarity and unionization.
• Capitalism and the rise of the informal economy.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global food industry.
• Capitalism and the privatization of public services.
• The influence of capitalism on workplace diversity and inclusion.
• Capitalism and the gig economy: The erosion of worker benefits and protections.
• The impact of capitalism on the welfare of indigenous communities.
• Capitalism and the rise of the sharing economy: Collaborative consumption or exploitation?
• The role of capitalism in shaping the gig economy in developed countries.
• Capitalism and the financialization of housing markets.
• The influence of capitalism on the access to and affordability of healthcare.
• Capitalism and the impact of digital platforms on labor markets.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural diversity and heritage.
• Capitalism and the rise of precarity in the labor force.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global fashion industry.
• Capitalism and the privatization of natural resources.
• The influence of capitalism on the development of smart cities.
• Capitalism and the impact of the sharing economy on traditional industries.
• The impact of capitalism on the mental health of workers in the gig economy.
• Capitalism and the rise of automation in manufacturing industries.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global tourism industry.
• Capitalism and the commodification of water resources.
• The influence of capitalism on the accessibility of affordable housing.
• Capitalism and the rise of remote work in the gig economy.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural imperialism and cultural diversity.
• Capitalism and the rise of the platform economy in developing countries.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global entertainment industry.
• Capitalism and the privatization of education.
• The influence of capitalism on the gig economy in rural areas.
• Capitalism and the impact of automation on service industries.
• The impact of capitalism on the preservation of natural habitats.
• Capitalism and the rise of freelance work in the gig economy.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global gaming industry.
• Capitalism and the commodification of healthcare services.
• The influence of capitalism on the accessibility of affordable transportation.
• Capitalism and the rise of remote work in the gig economy: Pros and cons.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural appropriation and representation.
• Capitalism and the role of government in regulating the gig economy.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global sports industry.
• Capitalism and the privatization of public transportation.
• The influence of capitalism on the gig economy in urban areas.
• Capitalism and the impact of automation on creative industries.
• The impact of capitalism on sustainable development and environmental justice.
• Capitalism and the rise of the sharing economy: Empowering or disempowering marginalized communities?
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global music industry.
• Capitalism and the commodification of mental health services.
• The influence of capitalism on the affordability of higher education.
• Capitalism and the rise of remote work in the gig economy: Implications for work-life balance.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural heritage preservation and indigenous rights.
• Capitalism and the influence of government policies on the gig economy.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global film industry.
• Capitalism and the privatization of healthcare.
• The influence of capitalism on the accessibility of affordable internet services.
• Capitalism and the rise of the gig economy: Implications for gender equality.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural diversity and inclusion.
• Capitalism and the rise of the sharing economy: Addressing ethical concerns.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global publishing industry.
• Capitalism and the commodification of eldercare services.
• The influence of capitalism on the affordability of vocational education.
• Capitalism and the rise of remote work in the gig economy: Implications for mental health.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural preservation and traditional knowledge.
• Capitalism and the influence of government policies on worker rights in the gig economy.
• The role of capitalism in shaping the global beauty industry.
• Capitalism and the privatization of mental health services.
• The influence of capitalism on the accessibility of affordable childcare.
• Capitalism and the rise of the gig economy: Implications for racial equality.
• The impact of capitalism on cultural imperialism and the dominance of Western culture.
• Capitalism and the rise of the sharing economy: Promoting ethical and sustainable practices.

These 123 capitalism essay topic ideas and examples encompass a wide range of areas and perspectives within the study of capitalism. Whether you are interested in its historical development, its impact on different industries, or its relationship with social and environmental issues, there is a topic that suits your research interests. Remember to choose a topic that aligns with your academic discipline, personal interests, and the available resources for conducting research. Happy writing!

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Home — Essay Samples — Economics — Political Economy — Capitalism

Essays on Capitalism

Capitalism and socialism essay topics and outline examples.

• The Evolution of Capitalism: From Its Origins to Modern Day
• Capitalism and Its Role in Promoting Innovation and Technology
• The Ethics of Capitalism: Exploring Moral Considerations in Free Markets
• Global Capitalism: Its Impact on Developing Economies
• The Relationship Between Capitalism and Environmental Sustainability
• Consumer Culture in Capitalist Societies: Implications and Critiques
• The Role of Government Regulation in Capitalist Economies
• Capitalism in the USA 1900-1940: A Historical Overview
• Capitalism vs. Socialism: Impact on Income Inequality
• The Impact of Capitalism on Underdevelopment in the Global South

Essay Title 1: Capitalism vs. Socialism: A Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems and Their Impacts

Thesis Statement: This argumentative essay critically evaluates capitalism and socialism as economic systems, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and societal consequences, and seeks to determine which system provides a more equitable and sustainable future.

• Introduction
• Capitalism: Market-Based Economy, Private Ownership, and Competition
• Socialism: Collective Ownership, Wealth Redistribution, and Government Control
• Economic Inequality: Wealth Disparities in Capitalist Societies
• Social Safety Nets: Welfare Programs and Social Services in Socialist Societies
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Capitalism's Role in Technological Advancements
• Environmental Sustainability: Examining the Impact of Both Systems on the Planet
• Conclusion: Striving for a Balanced Economic System that Addresses Inequities

Essay Title 2: The Role of Capitalism and Socialism in Modern Societies: Achieving Economic Prosperity and Social Equity

Thesis Statement: This argumentative essay explores the coexistence of capitalism and socialism within modern societies, emphasizing the potential benefits of a mixed economic system that combines market forces with social welfare measures to achieve economic prosperity and social equity.

• Mixed Economy: Combining Capitalist and Socialist Elements
• Income Redistribution: Progressive Taxation and Social Programs
• Healthcare and Education: Ensuring Universal Access and Quality
• Worker Rights: Labor Unions and Employment Protections
• Regulation and Competition: Balancing Market Dynamics and Consumer Protection
• Global Perspectives: Comparing Economic Systems in Different Countries
• Conclusion: Advancing Economic Prosperity and Social Equity Through a Balanced Approach

Essay Title 3: Capitalism, Socialism, and the Future of Economic Systems: Toward a More Equitable and Sustainable World

Thesis Statement: This argumentative essay envisions the future of economic systems, proposing the development of innovative models that incorporate the best aspects of both capitalism and socialism to create a more equitable, sustainable, and just global economy.

• Hybrid Models: Exploring Economic Systems That Promote Equity and Innovation
• Environmental Responsibility: Addressing Climate Change and Resource Conservation
• Global Wealth Distribution: Reducing Income Disparities Across Nations
• Education and Healthcare: Ensuring Access and Quality Worldwide
• Technology and Automation: Adapting to the Changing Nature of Work
• Collaborative Governance: International Cooperation for Economic Reform
• Conclusion: Striving for a New Economic Paradigm for a Better World

Socialism and Capitalism

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Pros and Cons of How Capitalism and Consumerism Play Role in One’s Destiny

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The Solution to Poverty in India: Socialism Or Capitalism

The concept of alienation, the concept of social class in capitalist reality, a theme of global capitalism in vermeer’s hat by timothy brook and slave ship by marcus rediker, marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, new europe: the case of the city in smith’s view, what is pink capitalism and its representation in giovanni’s room, capitalism in sherwood anderson’s "mother", "capitalism: a love story": summary, comparison of free enterprise and communism, racism and capitalism in japan, depiction of industrial capitalism in the film modern times, the concept of alienation in the works of karl marx, why hawaii is not quite paradise, jay gould: one of the robber barons and captains of industry, the complex relationship between capitalism and poverty, socialism vs. capitalism: a comparative analysis, how the columbian exchange benefited europe and north america, why is capitalism better than communism, the key characteristics of the free enterprise system.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor.

Main types of capitalism include advanced capitalism, corporate capitalism, finance capitalism, free-market capitalism, mercantilism, social capitalism, state capitalism and welfare capitalism. Other variants of capitalism include anarcho-capitalism, community capitalism, humanistic capitalism, neo-capitalism, state monopoly capitalism, and technocapitalism.

Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, Estonia, Canada, Denmark, etc.

Capitalism is driven by the law of supply and demand. In a capitalist society people have more freedom to choose their career paths. Countries that have capitalist economies today are not 100% capitalist. This is because they all have some form of government regulation to guide business.

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• Penny Debate
• Unemployment
• Universal Basic Income
• Supply and Demand
• American Dream
• Minimum Wage
• Real Estate
• Cosmetology

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Arguments for Capitalism and Socialism

Author: Thomas Metcalf Category: Social and Political Philosophy Wordcount: 993

Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a two-part series authored by Tom on the topic of capitalism and socialism. The first essay, on defining capitalism and socialism, is available here .

Listen here

Suppose I had a magic wand that allowed one to produce 500 donuts per hour. I say to you, “Let’s make a deal. You use this wand to produce donuts, and then sell those donuts for $500 and give me the proceeds. I’ll give you $10 for every hour you spend doing this. I’ll spend that time playing video games.”

My activity—playing video games—seems pretty easy. Your job requires much more effort. And I might end up with a lot more money than $10 for every hour you work. How is that fair?

In the story, the magic wand is analogous to capital goods : assets (typically machinery and buildings, such as robots, sewing machines, computers, and factories) that make labor, or providing goods and services, more productive. Standard definitions of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ indicate that, in general, capitalist systems permit people to privately own and control capital goods, whereas socialist systems do not. And capitalist systems tend to contain widespread wage labor, absentee ownership, and property income; socialist systems generally don’t. [1]

Capital goods are morally interesting. As in the case of the magic wand, ownership of capital goods can allow one to make lots of money without working. In contrast, other people have to work for a living. This might be unfair or harmful. This essay surveys and explains the main arguments in this debate. [2]

1. Capitalism

Arguments for capitalism tend to hold that it’s beneficial to society for there to be incentives to produce, own, and use capital goods like the magic wand, or that it’s wrong to forcibly prevent people from doing so. Here are four arguments for capitalism, stated briefly:

(1) Competition: ‘When individuals compete with each other for profits, this benefits the consumer.’ [3]

Critique : Competition also may encourage selfish and predatory behavior. Competition can also occur in some socialist systems. [4]

(2) Freedom: ‘Preventing people from owning capital restricts their freedom. Seizing their income in the form of taxes may constitute theft.’ [5]

Critiques : Maybe owning property, itself, restricts freedom, by excluding others from using it. [6] If I announce that I own something, I may be thereby announcing that I will force you not to use it. And maybe “freedom” requires the ability to pursue one’s own goals, which in turn requires some amount of wealth. [7] Further, if people must choose between work and starvation, then their choice to work may not be really “free” anyway. [8] And the general distribution of wealth is arguably the result of a morally arbitrary “natural lottery,” [9] which may not actually confer strict property-rights over one’s holdings. [10] I didn’t choose where I was born, nor my parents’ wealth, nor my natural talents, which allow me to acquire wealth. So perhaps it’s not a violation of my rights to take some of that property from me.

(3) Public Goods: [11] ‘When objects, including capital, must be shared with others, then no one is strongly motivated to produce them. In turn, society is poorer and labor is more difficult because production is inefficient.’ [12]

Critique : People might be motivated to produce capital for altruistic reasons, [13] or may be coerced in some socialist systems to do so. Some putatively socialist systems allow for profitable production of capital goods. [14]

  (4) Tragedy of the Commons: ‘When capital, natural resources, or the environment are publicly controlled, no one is strongly motivated to protect them.’ [15]

Critique : As before, people might be motivated by altruism. [16] Some systems with partially-private control of capital may nevertheless qualify as socialist. [17]

2. Socialism

Arguments for socialism tend to hold that it’s unfair or harmful to have a system like in the story of the magic wand, a system with widespread wage labor and property income. Here are four arguments for socialism, stated briefly:

(1) Fairness: ‘It’s unfair to make money just by owning capital, as is possible only in a capitalist system.’ [18]

Critique : Perhaps fairness isn’t as morally important as consent, freedom, property rights, or beneficial consequences. And perhaps wage laborers consent to work, and capital owners have property rights over their capital. [19]

(2) Inequality: ‘When people can privately own capital, they can use it to get even richer relative to the poor, and the wage laborers are left poorer and poorer relative to the rich, thereby worsening the inequality that already exists between capital-owners and wage-laborers.’ [20]

Critiques : This is a disputable empirical claim. [21] And perhaps the ability to privately own capital encourages people to invest in building capital goods, thereby making goods and services cheaper. Further, perhaps monopolies commonly granted by social control over capital are “captured” by wealthy special-interests, [22] which harm the poor by enacting regressive laws. [23]

(3) Labor: ‘Wage laborers are alienated from their labor, exploited, and unfree because they must obey their bosses’ orders.’ [24]

Critiques : If this alienation and exploitation are net-harmful to workers, then why do workers consent to work? If the answer is ‘because they’ll suffer severe hardship otherwise,’ then strictly speaking, this is a critique of allowing poverty, not a critique of allowing wage labor.

(4) Selfishness: ‘When people can privately own capital, they selfishly pursue profit above all else, which leads to further inequality, environmental degradation, non-productive industries, economic instability, colonialism, mass murder, and slavery.’

Critique : These are also disputable empirical claims. Maybe when people are given control over socially -owned capital, they selfishly extract personal wealth from it. [25] Maybe when the environment is socially controlled, everyone is individually motivated to over-harvest and pollute. [26] State intervention in the economy may be a major cause of the existence of non-productive industry, pollution, and economic instability. [27] Last, some of the worst perpetrators of historical evils are governments, not private corporations. [28]

  3. Conclusion

It is difficult to justifiably draw general conclusions about what a pure capitalism or socialism would be like in practice. [29] But an examination of the merits and demerits of each system gives us some guidance about whether we should move a society in either direction.

[1] See my Defining Capitalism and Socialism for an explanation of how to define these systems.

[2] For much-more-extensive surveys, see Gilabert and O’Neill n.d. and Arnold n.d.

[3] By analogy, different people might try to construct even better magic wands, or use them for better purposes. Typically the benefits are thought to include lower prices, increased equality, innovation, and more options. See Smith 2003 [1776]: bk. 1, ch. 2 and Friedman and Friedman 1979: ch. 1.

[4] Schweickart 2011 presents an outline of a market socialism comprising much competition.

[5] By analogy, if I legitimately own the magic wand, then what gives you the right to threaten violence against me if I don’t give it to you? Nozick 1974: ch. 7 presents a general discussion of how socialism might restrict freedom and how taxation may be akin to theft or forced labor.

[6] Spencer 1995 [1871]: 103-4 and Zwolinski 2015 discuss how property might require coercion. See also Scott 2011: 32-33. Indeed, property in general may essentially be theft (Proudhon 1994 [1840]).

[7] See Rawls (1999: 176-7) for this sort of argument. See John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’ by Ben Davies for an introduction.

[8] See e.g. Burawoy 1979 for a discussion of whether workers consent to work. See also Marx 2004 (1867): vol. IV, ch. VII.

[9] Rawls 1999: 62 ff.

[10] Relatedly, while one may currently hold capital, one may greatly owe the existence of that product to many other people or to society in general. See e.g. Kropotkin 2015 [1913]: chs. 1-3 and Murphy and Nagel 2002.

[11] A public good is a good that is non-excludable (roughly, it is expensive to prevent people from using it) and non-rivalrously consumed (roughly, preventing people from using it causes harm without benefiting anyone) (Cowen 2008).

[12] By analogy, why bother building magic wands at all if someone else is immediately going to take it from me and start using it? Standard economic theory holds that public goods (non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods) will, on the free market, be underproduced. This is normally taken to be an argument for government to produce public goods. See e.g. Gaus 2008: 84 ff.

[13] For example, according to Marxist communism, the ideal socialist society would comprise production for use, not for profit. See e.g. Marx 2004 [1867]: vol. 1 ch. 7. See also Kropotkin 1902, which is a defense of the general claim that humans will tend to be altruistic, at least in anarcho-communist systems.

[14] In a market-socialist system (cf. Schweickart 2011), it is possible to make capital goods and sell them at a profit that gets distributed to the laborers.

[15] By analogy, if I know that anyone in the neighborhood can use the magic wand, I might not invest my own time and money to maintain it. But if it’s mine alone, I care a lot more about maintaining it. This is the basis of the well-known ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ alleged problem. See, e.g., Hardin 1968.

[16] Kropotkin 1902.

[17] As before, in Schweickart’s (2011) system, firms will be motivated to protect capital if they must pay for capital’s deprecation, even though the capital is owned by society.

[18] By analogy, as noted, the wand-owner might make lots of money for basically doing no work. Sherman 1995: 130; Schweickart 2011: § 3.2.

[19] See e.g. Friedman 2002 for a collection of consequentialist arguments for capitalism, and Nozick 1974: chs. 3 and 7 for some arguments concerning freedom and capitalist systems.

[20] By analogy, the wand-owner might accumulate so much money as to start buying other magic wands and renting those out as well. See e.g. Piketty 2014.

[21] Taking the world as a whole, wealth in absolute terms has been increasing greatly, and global poverty has been decreasing steeply, including in countries that have moved in mostly capitalist directions. See e.g. World Bank Group 2016: 3. Friedman 1989: ch. 5 argues that capitalism is responsible for the improved position of the poor today compared to the past.

[22] See e.g. Friedman 1989: ch. 7 for a discussion of regulatory capture.

[23] Friedman 2002: chs. IV and IX; Friedman 1989: ch. 4.

[24] By analogy, the person I’ve hired to use the wand might need to obey my orders, because they don’t have a wand of their own to rent out, and they might starve without the job I’ve offered them. Marx 2009 [1932] introduces and develops this concept of alienation. See Dan Lowe’s 2015 Karl Marx’s Conception of Alienation for an overview. See also Anderson 2015 for an argument that private corporations coercively violate their workers’ freedom.

[25] See n. 21 above. This result is most-obvious in countries in which dictators enrich themselves, but there is nothing in principle preventing rulers of ostensibly democratic countries from doing so as well. Presumably this worry explains the presence of the Emoluments Clause in the U. S. Constitution.

[26] See n. 14.

[27] See e.g. Friedman 2002: chs. III and V and the example of compliance costs for regulations.

[28] See Huemer 2013: ch. 6 ff.

[29] All or nearly all large-scale economies have been mixed economies. In contrast, a pure capitalism would be an anarcho-capitalism (see e.g. Gaus 2010: 75 ff. and Huemer 2013), and a pure socialism wouldn’t permit people to privately own scissors. See also the entry “Defining Capitalism and Socialism.”

Anderson, Elizabeth. 2015. Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It) . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Cohen, G. A. 2009. Why Not Socialism? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cowen, Tyler. 2008. “Public Goods.” In David R. Henderson (ed.), The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics . Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Dagger, Richard and Terence Ball. 2019. “Socialism.” In Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (ed.), E ncyclopædia Britannica . Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/socialism

Dahl, Robert A. 1993. “Why All Democratic Countries have Mixed Economies.” Nomos 35: 259-82.

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Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. 2019. “Henri de Saint-Simon.” In Encyclopædia Britannica , Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henri-de-Saint-Simon

Friedman, David D. 1989. The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism , Second Edition. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company.

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Herzog, Lisa. 2019. “Markets.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , Spring 2019 Edition, URL =https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/markets/

Huemer, Michael. 2013. The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey . Houndmills, UK and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Kropotkin, P. 1902. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution . New York, NY: McClure Phillips & Co.

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Tom Metcalf is an associate professor at Spring Hill College in Mobile, AL. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He specializes in ethics, metaethics, epistemology, and the philosophy of religion. Tom has two cats whose names are Hesperus and Phosphorus. shc.academia.edu/ThomasMetcalf

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The rise of the current capitalist economy is believed to trace back to the American history. Both Quijano and Wallerstein, "Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System, believed that the capitalist economy would not exist without America. The authors draw various evidence that support claims on why America is considered the basis of the rise of a capitalist economy. For instance, three factors are viewed as critical for the development of the capitalist world economy such […]

What is Capitalism?

"Freedom is the open window through which pours the sunlight of the human spirit and human dignity" (Herbert Hoover). In the 1920s, America turned away from worldly concerns and began concentrating on domestic affairs. Some might refer to this period in America as the Decade of Optimism. It ushered in many forward thinkers, innovators, innovations, and cultural changes. For example, Henry Ford created an efficient and cheap means to mass produce automobiles. This allowed even those who earned a modest […]

Democratic Peace Theory

After World War II, a known characteristic of affluent, liberal, democratic states is that they tend to not not engage in war with one another. The democratic peace theory attributes to this tendency to democracy itself, claiming that it is a key peacekeeper due to the obligatory culture of democracy to cooperate with the regime, both leaders and citizens for their own benefit. The capitalist peace theory justifies the maintenance of peace on the incentive of trade to maintain peace […]

The War System of Colombia Capitalism

When people think of Colombia they might think of the popular singer- songwriter Shakira or, possibly, cocaine. This paper will discuss Colombia's ongoing Civil War. Colombia can be found on a map in the northern tip of South America. In 1525 Spain began to colonize Colombia but in 1813 Colombia, finally, won its independence back. Colombia has a free market economy, its GDP in 2017 was 309.2 billion USD, ranking at number 39 out of the 200 countries documented in […]

Free Market Capitalism Vs State Driven Policies

Today, in the 21st century, a countries' economy is running one of three ways. One option is being ran on state driven policies. Another is to be ran on capitalism approach. Most countries in the world today are a mixed economy, which is a combination of these two forms. Free market capitalism means the people of the country have economic freedom to buy and sell goods and services without any government intervention, such as price setting, and prices are all […]

Capitalism and Consumerism Throughout Art

How can art be utilized in exposing consumerism's destruction to a Capitalist society? Capitalism is a form of government based on demand and supply. Consumerism is an ideology found within Capitalism. Consumerism is a social and economic order that encourages the acquisition of goods and services in ever-increasing amounts (Dictionary.com) This ties into and benefits Capitalism because this type of society runs based on demand and supply. Meaning, the people get what they want (or think they want), even if […]

Racism Interconnection to Capitalism

Racial unrest has made a ton of social distress all through the pilgrim time frame up to the postmodern time of American history. Institutional restraint and basic bigotry have been the center of social control systems that have kept up mastery over the African American people group and different races considered sub-par compared to white Americans. European Americans, particularly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, were given uncommon benefits in parts of citizenship, arrive procurement, migration, instruction, and criminal strategy as from the […]

The History and Understanding of the Concept of a Minimum Wage

The concept of a minimum wage is self-explanatory: employees are guaranteed a pay rate that their employers cannot legally reduce. Today, minimum wage laws play a critical role in our economy; but this was not always the case. The first minimum wage laws were enacted in New Zealand in 1894 but did not come to the United States until 1938. The 1930s were defined by the Great Depression, an economic catastrophe that crippled the world, resulting in monumental levels of […]

The Temporalities of Capitalism

With the contemporary fiscal platform that our unyielding human consumption must serve as a catalyst for economic growth, nature is tasked with the impossible. Our environment and the most impoverished people often bear the brunt of the biodiversity collapse brought about by climate change. This change arises from the large-scale production and consumption processes of capitalism. Karl Marx's early philosophical manuscripts of 1844 are best known for developing his concept of "alienated labor," proposing a source for our estrangement from […]

Comparison of Capitalism and Socialism

Our world is steadily evolving, while the wealthy can keep up, the poor stay left behind. With the introduction of the internet we are constantly connected to the rest of the world. This is both beneficial and detrimental to the world. With this expansion of the global market we have become interdependent however we also have access to an abundance of resources. Capitalism is based around the idea of competition, who can work the hardest whereas communism is based around […]

Karl Marx Ideas of Capitalism and Communism

Karl Mar introduced a very thoughtful but controversial communism idea. He believed that social-economic structures influence the world's societal stages of history and revolution rather than reformation as the production cause in society. Moving from primitive society to the slavery principle (master vs. slave) to capitalism (factory owner vs. worker). Marx perceived that the last as well as greatest stage ought to be a classless society, one in which conflicts relating to class come to an end. This kind of […]

Capitalism is an Unparalleled Economic and Political System

Capitalism is a system known for promoting prosperity, wealth, freedom, and more. It goes without saying that any country that has ever existed will have inevitable setbacks. Ideally, the supposed lack of investment of S&P 500 companies in themselves, and homelessness in Seattle, did not come into fruition because of Capitalism. Nevertheless, critics suggest that an alternative to Capitalism is required to fix these issues. But these alternative systems, that they insist on implementing, have consistently failed to meet the […]

Childhood Obesity is an Epidemic in the USA

Introduction Childhood obesity has become an epidemic in the United States and other western industrialized societies. "Childhood obesity affects more than 18 percent of children in the United States, making it the most common chronic disease of childhood" (Obesity Action Coalition). According to the OAC, the percentage of children suffering from childhood obesity has tripled since 1980. A child is considered obese if their body mass index for their age is greater than 95 percent. Childhood obesity is both an […]

Capitalism and its Role

Can radical, rebellious music remain authentic in a modern global society? Alternatively, will the hip-hop message change once it is absorbed into the mainstream? Hip Hop started in the 1970s on the South Bronx streets, and it was a way for black people to deal with experiences of marginalization and oppression. Like punk rock, hip-hop was not considered to be a commercial thing in the first place, but it was an attitude of opposition to mainstream society through sampling, dance, […]

Understanding of Capitalism

Capitalism has been defined in different ways, but the main point is that it involves several organizations holding factors of production and a large number of potential investors unable to get into the market.  This essay will mostly address the issue of capitalism as it is in American continent the first part looks into the authors who have supported the ideas that capitalism is driven by the greed of investors and has related costs for its success.  The second portion […]

Pink Capitalism for LGBTQ Community

Pink Capitalism, plainly, is the incorporation of the LGBTQ movement and sexual diversity to capitalism and the market economy. It is a targeted inclusion of the LGBTQ community to generate a market focused specifically on them. And even though pride parades sweep away the world and legal turnarounds change our perspectives, it’s hard to deny that discrimination against the LGBTQ community exists, especially in the workplace. Pride parades are about celebrating diversity and inclusion. And while we do celebrate the […]

Capitalism in History

Capitalism is historically progressive in the sense that it creates material conditions for communism. It creates the condition to build the beginning of real human history and gives incentive for people to be productive under pretense of equal opportunity. A capitalist economic system rewards creating new products for profit. It is true that the rise in living standards, technological innovations and expanded freedom have come about under our capitalist economy, but it is also true that we have to give […]

What is Marxism?

Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883) was a radical social theorist, whose thoughts on social, economic and political systems are generally referred to as "Marxism" (Honderich, 1995). The basic tenets of Marxist philosophy are predicated on Marx's theory of history, which regards human history as a continuous struggle between socio-economic classes (Witt, et al, 1980). According to Marx, a particular class could rule over the rest of society only so long as that class best represented the economically productive forces of that […]

Weber, Exploitation, Capitalism, Protestantism

Introduction Religion is an aspect of the society that has both social and economic ties. As a part of the society, religion interacts with both the social and economic aspects of the society, thus shaping each other. Weber is one of the social theorists who have touched on religion in their theories. The rise of Protestantism in the world brought about various changes, especially in the working sector. While some of the people became hardworking others turned to exploit others. […]

Conscious Capitalism: what is It?

The primary concept of this case is Conscious Capitalism' which introduces a new holistic approach of doing business that seeks for the winning situations for all stakeholders by creating a higher purpose and foster the well-being of all stakeholders from various aspects. This new emerging paradigm eventually is more beneficial for the firm and the shareholders compared to the outcome of chasing after the profit maximization. "Conscious Capitalism: What Is It? Why Do We Need It? Does It Work?"  illustrates […]

Capitalism: a Love Story

The paper will begin by giving a general impression of the narrative, trailed by an assessment of how the narrative affected me. This will be trailed by an examination of whether I concur with Moore's message in the film or not, and why. The decision will be a conversation on whether the film has in any capacity changed my discernment on capitalism. There will be incorporated a catalog page refering to the assets utilized in the paper. In the event […]

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Essay Samples on Capitalism

Business and society: the fairer economic system for the society.

While researching the three different economic systems I became torn on the decision of which system I considered to be fairer on society. I am torn between capitalism and socialism as I believe both systems are fair in their own way. Capitalism is an economic...

• Economic systems

The Two Largest Economic Systems: Socialism and Communism

Over the course of history, socialism and communism have been two of the most disputed topics among people and government officials. Socialism is an economic and political system where the ways of making a living are owned by the workers who run them and the...

Baby Boomers vs Others: The Interesting Generation Gap

You would see Baby Boomers complaining about millennials whereas the silent generation also had complains about Baby Boomers and vice versa. It seems to be going on since the start of mankind. Infact, the generations that have existed uptil now had some differences among them....

• Baby Boomers

Cultural Capital: Main Topics of Conflict

Capital - 'accumulated labour' Economic Capital - easily translated to money Social Capital - made up of social connections that can be transformed into economic capital Cultural Capital – in the form of books or writings, can be institutionalised through the education system The ability...

• Cultural Capital

Ronald Reagan's Speech On Capitalism And Communism

Reagan's speech was delivered to crowd of thousands while at the Berlin Wall to order Gorbachev bring the wall down to protect citizens freedoms. By arguing against the wall, the president would be able to repress communism which is what George Kennan attempted to do...

• Ronald Reagan

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The Different Ideologies Of Capitalism, Socialism And Communism

The two belief systems are altogether different, they are both financial frameworks dependent on how society should function and its objective. Free enterprise depends on the normal challenge of creation in ventures and ranches for instance while communism is driven by balance with various classes....

The Issues Of America: Capitalism Vs Communism

Following quite a while of being a verboten belief system, communism is presently being proclaimed as an answer for the issues of America. Many in the broad communications, lawmakers both old and new, surely understood online life characters have all been vocally for the United...

The Debate About Socialism And Capitalism Among Young People

People should be able to keep what they earn, simple as that. Capitalism, although slightly drastic at times, supports that idea without question. However, an abundance of people strongly believe in socialism: the idea the everything is “fair and equal” and the government provides the...

• Political Philosophy

Karl Marx's Criticism Of Capitalism And View Of Communism

Marx criticized capitalism and proposed a solution for a better and stronger economy system, a system that will make our future safer where no one is lift behind (communism). Karl was not a big fan of capitalism because he saw how the workers are being...

The Debate On Capitalism And Communism Under Karl Marx's Philosophy

No one would be opposed to a world without poverty, but this is a tough concept to imagine. What most people fail to realize is that a world without poverty is not as far out of reach as most might think. Communism is an economic...

The Battle Of Two Political Theories: Capitalism And Socialism

“Socialism never seems to have any theory of wealth creation, only fanciful schemes for its reallocation,” so why do some economists favor socialism over capitalism if there has not been any sustainable wealth creation over the years and instead economic destruction (Reed). Whether or not...

How Social Conflict Can Explain The Emergence Of Capitalism

Introduction The primary objective of this essay is to explain how social conflict could result in the emergence of capitalism. In sociology, the social conflict theory is a macro-oriented radicalism perspective, which assumes society as a subject of inequality that produces conflict and social change...

• Communist Manifesto

Analysis Of Political Philosophy Theories And Moral Issues Within Them

Aristotle’s views on private property, interest, and the “fair” or “good” price of a good Aristotle (350 BC/1984) says that property should be private, but have common use (p. 13). He says this because men work the land, and cannot get along if they have...

• Mercantilism

North and South: The Role of Victorian Women in the Capitalistic Marketplace

Capitalism, Marketplace, and Class were some of the most dominant themes in the 19th century and Victorian age. These themes were essential not only because they defined society but because they also played an important role in the understanding of economic structure and developments in...

• North and South
• Victorian Era

Analysis of Eva's Role in Inspector Calls

Priestley’s character, Eva Smith, in An Inspector Calls, never appears in the play, but is omnipresent throughout and the audience gets to know about her as the chain of events unfold. From Inspector Goole’s enquiry with other characters into her suicidal death, we can perceive...

• Inspector Goole
• Social Class

The Impacts of Liberalism, Mercantilism and Marxism on International Political Economy

Mercantilism, liberalism, and Marxism all play an enormous role in international political economy. Each have their own ideas of the major actors, state-market relationships, and the overall international cooperation between states. Neo-mercantilists and Liberals both agree that 1979 was a significant year for China because...

Capitalism in the Movie Avatar by James Cameron

The movie Avatar takes place in a futuristic time on a planet called Pandora. On Pandora lives an indigenous people called the Na’vi. The Na’vi people live in perfect peace with nature and worship Eywa, a mother goddess. However, a large corporation called RDA is...

Avatar by James Cameron As the Concept of Capitalism

Avatar, James Cameron’s 3D epic, is the world’s highest-grossing movie of all time. Everything about it is extravagant: computer generated images to vivid graphics. Many people have seen it, but have they ever thought of what the film is truly about? Avatar offers us a...

Universal Basic Income: A Modern Society’s Dream Come True

Imagine receiving a thousand dollars in your bank account every month, for the rest of your life, regardless of your status or income, no questions asked, no work or payback required. - Impractical you say? Andrew Yang, a 2020’s presidential candidate is running for president...

• Modern Society
• Universal Basic Income

John Berger, Publicity and Denaturalisation

John Peter Berger (5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. He is best known for his novel G. and his book and BBC series Ways of Seeing. His books’ ideas and arguments (Ways of Seeings and...

• John Berger

Max Weber and the Iron Cage of Bureaucracy

The technological and scientific advances of history are said to have been the prime motivators for the change from traditional to modern day society, but German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was rather a shift of ideas that drove this change. In feudal society,...

• Bureaucracy

Max Weber and His Views on Capitalism in Europe

In this essay, I will discuss Weber’s thoughts in relation to medieval legal systems across the globe, and how the law has developed alongside the dimensions of polity, economics and aspects of society. I will draw attention to legal issues which have developed through modernity,...

Critical Analysis of the Articles: Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work by Jean Anyon and The Forms of Capital by Pierre Bourdieu

In today’s society social capital is integrated throughout family’s cultural traditions, social networks and educational policy. In the article, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work” by Jean Anyon, she argues the education system in America today reinforces the social inequalities we currently face...

Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom: Questioning Socialism

Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman battles against the effects of capitalism and to justify the government intervention in the market. The link between democracy and capitalism, or governmental and economic freedom. Friedman asserts his argument around the relation between the economic freedom and governmental...

Socialism as the Promising Population's Philosophy

Today, socialism is one of the most prevalent alternatives to capitalism. So it's only natural that, as the poster child for capitalism, the United States has a very tricky relationship with socialism. The history of socialism within the U.S. is one of ineffective execution within...

• Human Population

The Social Stratification in Uzbekistan: Structure and Standards

Social Stratification When it comes to the growth and progress on an economy there are numerous aspects that play their part. This can be seen in the fall of many economies where they neglected a single aspect that was seen to be minute. Even so,...

• Social Stratification

Economic Inequality as Seen by Policymakers

Since 19th century, the economists tried to identify and explain the major causes that lead to inequality but always obtaining a scarce consensus. The first was Marx in his book 'The Capital) that pointed exploitation as the main cause, where people in upper classes get...

• Economic Inequality

Consumerism Manipulation in Capitalist Society

Since the moment we were born, our consumerist society has been making an enormous effort to convince us that we’re not good enough simply by being the way we are. The advertising industry has made us believe that the only way to feel comfortable with...

• Consumerism

Capitalism’s Characteristics In Great Britain

As soon as our nation experiences an economic downturn the media floods us with stories about protestors marching on Wall Street. We turn on our TV and every news station shows images of signs saying things like “Wall Street is the Real Weapons of Mass...

• Great Britain

Barbarians At The Gate: The Fall Of RJR Nabisco

The problem with financial capitalism appears both in the CEO of RJR Nabisco and the private equity people like Henry Kravis. The capitalistic system allowed them to leverage more capital from high risk sources (bonds and loans) which are part of this system. This phenomenon...

• Economic Problem

Identifying the Social Conflicts Existing Within a Capitalistic Society

Social Conflicts The main focus of this paper is how class, state, and social controls within a capitalistic society lead to increased crime due to the criminal laws and criminal justice system that is forced on the lower middle class. Social conflict theory is the...

• Criminology Theories

The Compatability Of Capitalism With Traditional Morality

The inquiry whether private enterprise is perfect with "customary profound quality" is plainly on the motivation due to our current political circumstance. On the best proof we have, Ronald Reagan was chosen president by an alliance of individuals, some of whom needed to " unleash...

The Comparison Of Capitalism, Communism & Socialism

The dictionary definition of capitalism is “an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” Capitalism makes it so that someone with very minimal wealth and resources can work their...

Best topics on Capitalism

1. Business and Society: the Fairer Economic System for the Society

2. The Two Largest Economic Systems: Socialism and Communism

3. Baby Boomers vs Others: The Interesting Generation Gap

4. Cultural Capital: Main Topics of Conflict

5. Ronald Reagan’s Speech On Capitalism And Communism

6. The Different Ideologies Of Capitalism, Socialism And Communism

7. The Issues Of America: Capitalism Vs Communism

8. The Debate About Socialism And Capitalism Among Young People

9. Karl Marx’s Criticism Of Capitalism And View Of Communism

10. The Debate On Capitalism And Communism Under Karl Marx’s Philosophy

11. The Battle Of Two Political Theories: Capitalism And Socialism

12. How Social Conflict Can Explain The Emergence Of Capitalism

13. Analysis Of Political Philosophy Theories And Moral Issues Within Them

14. North and South: The Role of Victorian Women in the Capitalistic Marketplace

15. Analysis of Eva’s Role in Inspector Calls

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• Cosmetology
• Gift Card Industry
• Non-Profit Organization
• Real Estate
• International Business

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Capitalism Essays (Examples)

Promises Of Democracy Capitalism In Ukraine

Risen, J. (2019). I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Retrieved from   https://theintercept.com/2019/09/25/i-wrote-about-the-bidens-and-ukraine-years-ago-then-the-right-wing-spin-machine-turned-the-story-upside-down/

The Modern World Of Autonomy Vs Heteronomy

Weber, Max. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. New Introduction and Translation by Stephen Kalberg. ROXBURY PUBLISHING COMPANY, 2001. 13-37

1960s Cold War

Analyzing the speeches of angela y davis, media and its grip on youth culture, domestic extremism and terrorism.

Doyle, E. (Ed.). (2018). Antifa and the Radical Left. Greenhaven Publishing LLC.

Democracy In America In The 21st Century

Effectiveness of the war on drugs.

ACLU (2020). Against drug prohibition. Retrieved from:   https://www.aclu.org/other/against-drug-prohibition  " target="_blank" REL="NOFOLLOW">

War On Drugs

John lewis gaddis.

Paxton, Robert. Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage, 2012.

Related Topics

• Global Capitalism

Category Topics

• Economic Status
• Economic Factors
• Economic Sustainability
• Global Economic Crisis
• Gross Domestic Product
• Economic Policy
• Economic History
• Economics And Finance
• Supply And Demand

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Capitalism Essay Topics & Ideas

• Capitalism Essay Topics for High School Students
• Capitalism Compare and Contrast Essay Topics

Argumentative Essay Topics About Capitalism

Good essay topics about capitalism, persuasive essay topics about capitalism.

• Interesting Essay Topics About Capitalism

✒️ Capitalism Essay Topics for High School Students

• “How to Reinvent Capitalism – And Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth”: Article Review
• “State Capitalism Comes of Age” by Ian Bremmer
• A Character Analysis: Boxer and Capitalism in George Orwell’s Animal Farm
• A Comparison Between Socialism And Capitalism Economics
• A Study of The Drawbacks of Capitalism in The Time Machine
• A Study on The Opinion of Karl Marx in Regard to Opposing Capitalism
• A. Smith and K. Marx: Contrasting Views of Capitalism Research
• According To Karl Marx Capitalism Sociology
• Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism
• Adam Smith’s understanding of capitalism
• Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism
• Alienation and Capitalism
• American Individualism vs. Capitalism Norms
• An Invisible Hand of Capitalism in the Business
• Andrew Carnegie And The Rise of Industrial Capitalism
• Arguments Against Capitalism
• Assess the Marxist View That the Main Role of the Family Is to Serve the Interests of Capitalism
• Boltanski and Chapello: New Spirit of Capitalism Analysis
• British Capitalism Development Definition
• Can Capitalism Be Ethical?
• Capitalism & Socialism
• Capitalism according to Karl Marx
• Capitalism and Alienation: The Foundation
• Capitalism and Colonialism Expository

✨ Best capitalism Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• Marx’s View of Exploitation of Labor under Capitalism For example, he argued that employers used employees to ensure they achieve high profitability. He believed that employers did not attract and select employees from the market to utilize their knowledge and skills but rather to exploit them to ….
• Heart of Greed; Capitalism and Human Nature Throughout time, people of all ideologies and social standings have agreed that poverty is an undeniable hindrance to society at any stage. Marxists, communists, capitalists, and even anarchists across time have all agreed that poverty is the ….
• Natural Capitalism Theory Sample The Natural Capitalism theory shows. how people determinations and demands influence on external environment: nature. animate beings and all others. It doesn’t average that. this manner of believing wanted from us go more confident and careful about ….
• Conscious Capitalism In the introduction of conscious capitalism, John Mackey gives us a brief history on how he established Safer Way which is now known as Whole Foods Market with no prior business education background. His intention was to create a business that was ….
• Pros and Cons of Capitalism Capitalism is a general term for an economic system where the means of the manufacture, sale and distribution of goods and services is privately owned and operates with minimal control and oversight from government agencies. Let’s see what benefits ….
• Capitalism and its Hazard for Our Planet Capitalism is on of many different systems of government that has been created on this planet. It also happens to be one of the most wasteful. It is an economic system that was created in a different time when resources were in abundance and people ….
• Capitalism and Argos This report sets out a case for the international expansion of Argos. It argues that, in light of the slowing UK retail market and rising labour costs, there is great opportunity for Argos to internationalise to exploit cheaper labour costs and ….
• Capitalism and Feudalism: The Lowell System Capitalism and Feudalism: The Lowell System During the mid-nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution was taking shape, so too, was an economic system in Lowell, Massachusetts. The system involved a series of textile mills, which hired mostly ….
• Weber, the Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic According to Marx’s theory, labour is what define oneself in the world and give meaning to one’s life. Weber emphasized that theory when he published in 1904 “The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism”. Contrary to what if often thought, ….
• Adam Smith Theory on Capitalism Teenage Pregnancy Problem Statement Teenagers in Antigua 12-16 are becoming pregnant, which result to delay or incomplete high school education. Literature review Teenage pregnancy in Antigua has reached an alarming rate. With high increase of teen ….
• Origins and Future of Capitalism by Carl Marx and Max Weber Both Carl Marx and Max Weber wrote extensively on capitalism, its origins, and its future. Although, they agreed on a few very small points, for the main part, they strongly disagreed. Only through the analysis of their main differences in the two ….
• The Genesis of Capitalism Amongst a South American Peasantry The Genesis of Capitalism Amongst a South American Peasantry Michael Taussig Taussig beliefs are based on his field research. He believed that the behavior and certain beliefs of lower classes suggest that the characteristics of the capital mode of ….
• Free Market System or Capitalism in the United States Today in the United States, a free market system or capitalism is the main economic system. I am interested in this subject because I someday wish to own my own business. I believe that in the future this topic will be very useful to me. Among the ….
• Calvinistic Capitalism in a Modern Context The Protestant Reformation was a major movement in sixteenth century Europe initially aimed at reforming the beliefs and practices of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church’s religious ambitions were supplemented with motivated political rulers who ….
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism The most significant advice Ben Franklin had was, “Remember that time is money” (quoted in Weber, p.14). Franklin’s advice is to the young tradesman regarding the importance of time and money based on the spirit of capitalism. Weber also mentions ….
• Capitalism and Communism Writings Comparison Andrew Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth describes a capitalist society in which each man works for himself in the race for independent wealth. In this caste society, progress is defined as the continual accumulation of material wealth. An individual’….
• Michael Moore and his Movie About Capitalism The movie was very inciteful and funny by the way that Michael Moore reveals the insidious role that Capitalism has played in America. The movie brought a question to my mind which is “What is the price that America pays for its love of capitalism? ”….
• Socialism vs Capitalism Although Capitalism has a different meaning in various groups, the term is commonly acknowledged as “the private ownership of the means of production, and the coordination of the economy by the market” (Bresser-Pereira, 2012, p. 22). On the surface, ….
• Weber’ s Conseption: Capitalism Essay Max Weber was one of the universe s greatest sociologists and wrote a batch about the capitalist universe he lived in. He had a different construct of capitalist society than most of his coevalss. He looked at capitalist economy from all the ….

✍ Capitalism Compare and Contrast Essay Topics

• Capitalism and Freedom Book Review
• Capitalism and Globalization Effects
• Capitalism and Individualism in Robinson Crusoe
• Capitalism and Industrialization in the “Communist Manifesto” by Marx
• Capitalism and its Effect on Consumers and Workers
• Capitalism and Its Influence on Globalization
• Capitalism and Its Influence on the Environment
• Capitalism and Its Role in Commodity Exchange and Value Essay (Book Review)
• Capitalism and Just Eat It Documentaries Contrast
• Capitalism and leisure
• Capitalism and Poverty Research
• Capitalism and the American Dream
• Capitalism and The American Dream in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
• Capitalism and World Inequality
• Capitalism as a Cause of AIDS Spread
• Capitalism as Masculine Identity in American Theater: Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross
• Capitalism Characteristics and American Identity
• Capitalism Concept Evolution
• Capitalism History: Ancient and Modern Capitalism
• Capitalism in Adam Smith’s and Karl Marx’s Views
• Capitalism in America Essay (Critical Writing)
• Capitalism in America in 1865-1930’s Research
• Capitalism in Canadian Society
• Capitalism in Marx’s, Weber’s, Durkheim’s Theories Essay (Critical Writing)
• Capitalism in Modern Societies Term
• Capitalism in Poland and Its Transitional Stage Research
• Capitalism in the US: Criticism and Alternative
• Capitalism in Today’s Society
• Capitalism is Good or Bad?
• Capitalism Problem: Video Analysis
• Capitalism Promotes Greed and Selfishness
• Capitalism runs our society It has its hand in how everything in
• Capitalism Spirit and the Protestant Ethic
• Capitalism System: David Harvey’s View
• Capitalism versus Communism Term
• Capitalism Versus Environmental Sustainability
• Capitalism vs Democracy
• Capitalism Vs Socialism
• Capitalism vs. Socialism Term
• Changes in French capitalism since the Second world war
• Chapter 14 – Capitalism and the Economy
• Chaucer’s Pardoner: Investigating The Capitalism
• Christian Beliefs and Capitalism
• Clean Capitalism in Organizations
• Climate Change: Is Capitalism The Problem or the Solution?
• Cold War: The Opposition of Communism and Capitalism
• Communication, Capitalism and the Mass Media
• Communism and Capitalism
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• Comparing of The Communism and Capitalism Economic Systems
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Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy revisited

• September 8, 2023

Niall Ferguson

• Themes: Geopolitics, History

In the titanic struggle between capitalism and socialism, there can only be one winner.

This essay was first published in Past and Present: Perspectives from the Engelsberg Seminar, Axess Publishing , 2020 . It was published by  Bokförlaget Stolpe , in collaboration with the  Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation .

Joseph Schumpeter was pessimistic. ‘Can capitalism survive?’ he asked in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). His answer was stark: ‘No. I do not think it can.’ He then posed and answered a second question: ‘Can socialism work? Of course it can.’ Perhaps the Austrian-born economist’s pessimism was simply the effect of teaching at Harvard. Yet Schumpeter offered four plausible reasons for believing that socialism’s prospects would be brighter than capitalism’s in the second half of the twentieth century, even if he signalled his strong preference for capitalism in his ironical discussion of socialism.

First, he suggested, capitalism’s greatest strength — its propensity for ‘creative destruction’ – is also a source of weakness. Disruption may be the process that clears out the obsolescent and fosters the advent of the new, but precisely for that reason it can never be universally loved. Second, capitalism itself tends towards oligopoly, not perfect competition.

The more concentrated economic power becomes, the harder it is to legitimize the system, especially in America, where ‘big business’ tends to get confused with ‘monopoly’. Third, capitalism ‘creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest’ — namely, intellectuals.

Finally, Schumpeter noted, socialism is politically irresistible to bureaucrats and democratic politicians.

The idea that socialism would ultimately prevail over capitalism was quite a widespread view — especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It persisted throughout the Cold War . ‘The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many sceptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive’, wrote Paul Samuelson, Schumpeter’s pupil, in the 1961 edition of his economics textbook — a sentence that still appeared in the 1989 edition. In successive editions, Samuelson’s hugely influential book carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the United States at some point between 1984 and 1997 (see figure 1). The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the timeframe had been moved forward to 2002–2012. The graph was quietly dropped after the 1980 edition.

Samuelson was by no means the only American scholar to make this mistake. Other economists in the 1960s and 1970s — notably Campbell McConnell and George Bach — were ‘so over-confident about Soviet economic growth that evidence of model failure was repeatedly blamed on events outside the model’s control’, such as ‘bad weather’. Curiously, McConnell’s textbook more or less consistently estimated US GNP to be double that of the USSR between its 1960 and its 1990 editions, despite also insisting in the same period that the Soviet economy had a growth rate roughly double the American. Yet it was Lorie Tarshis whose textbook drew the most damaging fire (from William F. Buckley amongst others) for its sympathetic treatment of economic planning, despite the fact that Tarshis was more realistic in his assessment of Soviet growth. The uncritical use of the simplistic ‘production possibility frontier’ framework — in which all economies essentially make a choice between guns and butter — was a key reason for the tendency to overrate Soviet performance. For example, as late as 1984 John Kenneth Galbraith could still insist that ‘the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.’ Economists who discerned the miserable realities of the planned economy, such as G. Warren Nutter of the University of Virginia, were few and far between — almost as rare as historians, such as Robert Conquest , who grasped the enormity of the Soviet system’s crimes against its own citizens.

The majority view exemplified by Samuelson and Galbraith was of course wrong. Despite Schumpeter’s pessimism, capitalism survived precisely because socialism did not work. After 1945, according to Angus Maddison’s estimates , the Soviet economy was never more than 44 percent the size of that of the United States. By 1991, Soviet GDP was less than a third of US GDP. The tendency of American intelligence experts was to exaggerate the extent of Soviet success. But those who visited the Soviet Union could hardly miss its inferiority.

Moreover, beginning in around 1979, the very term ‘socialism’ went into a decline, at least in the English-speaking world. Use of ‘capitalism’ also declined — as the two terms were in some senses interdependent, often appearing on the same page — but not as much. This was a humiliating reversal of fortune; socialism had led from the second half of the nineteenth century until the mid-1920s, and again in the 1960s and 1970s.

The terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ had their origins in the British Industrial Revolution . As the Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen argued, nineteenth-century capitalism was an authentically Darwinian system , characterized by seemingly random mutation, occasional speciation and differential survival. Yet precisely the volatility of the more or less unregulated markets created by the Industrial Revolution caused consternation amongst many contemporaries. Until there were significant breakthroughs in public health, mortality rates in industrial cities were markedly worse than in the countryside. Moreover, the advent of a new and far from regular ‘business cycle’, marked by periodic crises of industrial over-investment and financial panic, generally made a stronger impression on people than the gradual increase in the economy’s average growth rate. Though the Industrial Revolution manifestly improved life over the long run, in the short run it seemed to make things worse.

Intellectuals, as Schumpeter observed, were not slow to draw attention to this shadow side. Steeped in German literature and philosophy, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle was the first to identify what seemed the fatal flaw of the industrial economy: that it reduced all social relations to what he called, in his great essay Past and Present, ‘the cash nexus’.

That phrase so much pleased the son of an apostate Jewish lawyer from the Rhineland that he and his co-author, the heir of a Wuppertal cotton mill-owner, purloined it for the outrageous ‘manifesto’ they published on the eve of the 1848 Revolutions.

The founders of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were just two of many radical critics of the industrial society, but it was their achievement to devise the first internally consistent blueprint for an alternative social order. A mixture of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy , which represented the historical process as dialectical, and the political economy of David Ricardo, which posited diminishing returns for capital and an ‘iron’ law of wages, Marxism took Carlyle’s revulsion against the industrial economy and substituted a utopia for nostalgia.

The essence of Marxism was the belief that the industrial economy was doomed to produce an intolerably unequal society divided between the bourgeoisie, the owners of capital, and a property-less proletariat. Capitalism inexorably demanded the concentration of capital in ever fewer hands and the reduction of everyone else to wage slavery, which meant being paid only ‘that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer’.

Before identifying why they were wrong, we need to acknowledge what Marx and his disciples were right about. Inequality did increase as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Between 1780 and 1830 output per laborer in the UK grew over 25 percent but wages rose barely 5 percent.

The proportion of national income going to the top percentile of the population rose from 25 percent in 1801 to 35 percent in 1848. In Paris in 1820, around 9 percent of the population were classified as ‘proprietors and rentiers’ (living from their investments) and owned 41 percent of recorded wealth. By 1911 their share had risen to 52 percent. In Prussia, the share of income going to the top 5 percent rose from 21 percent in 1854 to 27 percent in 1896 and to 43 percent in 1913. Industrial societies, it seems clear, grew more unequal over the course of the nineteenth century. This had predictable consequences. In the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, for example, the mortality rate for individuals with an income of less than 800 marks a year was thirteen times higher than that for individuals earning over 50,000 marks.

It was not necessary to be an intellectual to be dismayed by the inequality of industrial society. The Welsh-born factory-owner Robert Owen envisaged an alternative economic model based on co-operative production and utopian villages like the ones he founded at Orbiston in Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana. It was in a letter to Owen, written by Edward Cowper in 1822, that the word ‘socialism’ in its modern sense first appears. An unidentified woman was, Cowper thought, ‘well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist’. Five years later, Owen himself argued that ‘the chief question … between the modern … Political Economists, and the Communionists or Socialists, is whether it is more beneficial that this capital should be individual or in common.’

The term ‘capitalism’ made its debut in an English periodical in April 1833 — in the London newspaper the Standard — in the phrase ‘tyranny of capitalism’, part of an article on ‘the ill consequences of that greatest curse that can exist amongst men, too much money-power in too few hands’. Fifteen years later, the Caledonian Mercury referred with similar aversion to ‘that sweeping tide of capitalism and money-loving which threatens our country with the horrors of a plutocracy’.

Yet the revolution eagerly anticipated by Marx never materialized — at least, not where it was supposed to, in the advanced industrial countries. The great bouleversements of 1830 and 1848 were the results of short-run spikes in food prices and financial crises more than of social polarization. As agricultural productivity improved in Europe, as industrial employment increased and as the amplitude of the business cycle diminished, the risk of revolution declined. Instead of coalescing into an impoverished mass, the proletariat subdivided into ‘labour aristocracies’ with skills and a Lumpenproletariat with vices. The former favoured strikes and collective bargaining over revolution and thereby secured higher real wages. The latter favoured gin. The respectable working class had their trade unions and working men’s clubs. The ruffians had the music hall and street fights.

The prescriptions of the Communist Manifesto were in any case singularly unappealing to the industrial workers they were aimed at. Marx and Engels called for the abolition of private property; the abolition of inheritance; the centralization of credit and communications; the state ownership of all factories and instruments of production; the creation of ‘industrial armies for agriculture’; the abolition of the distinction between town and country; the abolition of the family; ‘community of women’ (wife-swapping) and the abolition of all nationalities. By contrast, mid-nineteenth-century liberals wanted constitutional government , the freedoms of speech, press and assembly, wider political representation through electoral reform, free trade and, where it was lacking, national self-determination (‘Home Rule’). In the half-century after the upheaval of 1848 they got a great many of these things — enough, at any rate, to make the desperate remedies of Marx and Engels seem de trop. In 1850 only France, Greece and Switzerland had franchises in which more than a fifth of the population got to vote. By 1900 ten European countries did, and Britain and Sweden were not far below that threshold. Broader representation led to legislation that benefited lower-income groups; free trade in Britain meant cheap bread, and cheap bread plus rising nominal wages thanks to union pressure meant a significant gain in real terms for workers. Building labourers’ day wages in London doubled in real terms between 1848 and 1913. Broader representation also led to more progressive taxation. Britain led the way in 1842 when Sir Robert Peel introduced a peacetime income tax; by 1913 the standard rate was 14 pence in the pound. Prior to 1842 nearly all British tax revenue had come from the indirect taxation of consumption, via customs and excise duties, regressive taxes that take a proportionately smaller amount of your income the richer you are. By 1913 a third of revenue was coming from direct taxes on the relatively rich. In 1842 the central government had spent virtually nothing on education and the arts and sciences. In 1913 those items accounted for 10 percent of expenditure. By that time, Britain had followed Germany in introducing a state pension for the elderly.

Marx and Engels were wrong on two scores, then. First, their iron law of wages did not exist. Wealth did indeed become highly concentrated under capitalism, and it stayed that way into the second quarter of the twentieth century, but income differentials began to narrow as real wages rose and taxation became less regressive. Capitalists understood what Marx missed: that workers were also consumers. It therefore made no sense to try to grind their wages down to subsistence levels. On the contrary, as the case of the United States was making increasingly clear, there was no bigger potential market for capitalist enterprises than their own employees. Far from condemning the masses to ‘immiseration’, the mechanization of textile production created growing employment opportunities for Western workers — albeit at the expense of Indian spinners and weavers — and the decline in the prices of cotton and other goods meant that Western workers could buy more with their weekly wages.

The second mistake Marx and Engels made was to underestimate the adaptive quality of the nineteenth-century state — particularly when it could legitimize itself as a nation-state. In his Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right , Marx had famously called religion the ‘opium of the masses’. If so, then nationalism was the cocaine of the middle classes. Between 1830 and 1905 eight nation-states achieved either independence or unity: Greece (1830), Belgium (1830–39), Romania (1856), Italy (1859–71), Germany (1864–71), Bulgaria (1878), Serbia (1867–78) and Norway (1905). But the American Southerners failed in their bids for statehood, as did the Armenians, the Croats, the Czechs, the Irish, the Poles, the Slovaks, the Slovenes and the Ukrainians. The Hungarians, like the Scots, made do with the role of junior partners in dual monarchies with empires they helped to run. As for such ethno-linguistically distinct peoples as the Roma, Sinti, Kashubes, Sorbs, Wends, Vlachs, Székelys, Carpatho-Rusyns and Ladins, no one seriously thought them capable of political autonomy.

Entities like Italy or Germany, composites of multiple statelets, offered all their citizens a host of benefits: economies of scale, network externalities, reduced transaction costs and the more efficient provision of key public goods like law and order, infrastructure and health. The new states could make Europe’s big industrial cities, the breeding grounds of both cholera and revolution, finally safe. Slum clearance, boulevards too wide to barricade, bigger churches, leafy parks, sports stadiums and above all more policemen — all these things transformed the great capitals of Europe, not least Paris, which Baron Georges Haussmann completely recast for Napoleon III. All the new states had imposing façades; even defeated Austria lost little time in reinventing itself as ‘imperial-royal’ Austria-Hungary, its architectural identity set in stone around Vienna’s Ringstrasse.

But behind the façades there was real substance. Schools were built, the better to drum standardized national languages into young heads. Barracks were erected, the better to train the high-school graduates to defend their fatherland. And railways were constructed in places where their profitability looked doubtful, the better to transport the troops to the border, should the need arise. Peasants became Frenchmen — or Germans, or Italians, or Serbs, depending where they happened to be born.

So effective was the system of nation-building that when the European governments resolved to go to war over two arcane issues — the sovereignty of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the neutrality of Belgium — they were able, over more than four years, to mobilize in excess of 70 million men as soldiers or sailors. In France and Germany around a fifth of the pre-war population — close to 80 percent of adult males — ended up in uniform.

When the leaders of European socialism met in Brussels at the end of July 1914, they could do little more than admit their own impotence. A general strike could not halt a world war. What gave socialism a shot was that the hypertrophic nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century plunged the world into not just one but two world wars . Without these catastrophes, it is inconceivable that so many devotees of Marx would have come to power in the seventy years after 1917. The world wars made the case for socialism in multiple ways.

First, they seemed to confirm the destructive tendencies of ‘imperialism, the highest form of capitalism’. Second, they greatly expanded the role of the state, which became the principal purchaser of goods and services in most combatant countries, creating precisely the kind of state-controlled economy that socialist theory claimed would perform better than free markets. Third, the wars acted as a great leveller, imposing very high marginal rates of taxation, wage controls and price controls in ways that tended to reduce wealth and income disparities. Fourth, in 1917 the German government financed the Bolshevik coup in Russia that brought Lenin to power.

The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism , the ‘grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million’ for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the ‘Great Leap Forward’, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.

The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behaviour by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of Communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.

Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and towards a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle the restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of ‘real existing socialism’ in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the ‘Washington consensus’) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and lowering marginal tax rates. As figure 4 shows, the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all OECD countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.

By 2007, socialism seemed dead almost everywhere. Only the most ardent believers could look at Cuba or Venezuela — much less North Korea — as models offering a better life than capitalism. Even when the era of globalization and deregulation ended in the disarray of the global financial crisis, socialism did not initially show much sign of making a comeback. In most countries, the financial crisis of 2008–9 was more politically beneficial to the populists of the right, illustrating that, as in the 19th century, national identity tended to trump class consciousness whenever the two came into conflict.

Why, then, has socialism come back into vogue in our time — and in America, of all places? To answer this question, it is helpful to turn back to Schumpeter. It will be remembered that he argued, first, that capitalism’s propensity for ‘creative destruction’ was also a source of weakness; second, that capitalism tends towards oligopoly, not perfect competition; third, that capitalism ‘creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest’, namely intellectuals; and, finally, that socialism is politically attractive to bureaucrats and (many) democratic politicians. All four tendencies are visible in the United States today. Although policymakers have been successful in reducing the volatility of output and the rate of unemployment since the financial crisis — and very successful in raising the prices of financial assets above their pre-crisis level — the relative losers of the past decade have been succumbing in alarming numbers to what Case and Deaton have called ‘deaths of despair’. A number of authors have noted the decline in competition that has afflicted the United States in the recent past, most obviously but by no means only in the information technology sector, which has come to be dominated by a handful of network platforms . The American academy is now skewed much further to the left than it was in Schumpeter’s time. And, just as Schumpeter might have anticipated, a new generation of ‘progressive’ politicians has come forward with the familiar promises to soak the rich to fund new and bureaucratic entitlement programmes. It is noteworthy that younger Americans — nine out of ten of whom now pass through the country’s left-leaning college system — are disproportionately receptive to these promises.

New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is often portrayed as an extremist for the democratic socialist views that she espouses. However, survey data show that her views are close to the median for her generation. The Millennials and Generation Z — that is, Americans aged 18 to 38 — are burdened by student loans and credit card debt. Millennials’ early working lives were blighted by the financial crisis and the sluggish growth that followed. In later life, absent major changes in fiscal policy, they seem unlikely to enjoy the same kind of entitlements enjoyed by current retirees. Under different circumstances, the under-39s might conceivably have been attracted to the entitlement-cutting ideas of the Republican Tea Party (especially if those ideas had been sincere). Instead, we have witnessed a shift to the political left by young voters on nearly every policy issue, economic and cultural alike. As figure 5 shows, it is the youngest voters in American who are most attracted to socialism, to the extent that those aged under 25 profess to prefer it to capitalism. This must be a matter of serious concern for Republicans, as ten years from now, if current population trends hold, Gen Z and Millennials together will make up a majority of the American voting-age population. Twenty years from now, they will represent 62 percent of all eligible voters.

Of course, it depends what is meant by ‘capitalism.’ According to a 2018 Gallup poll, just 56 percent of all Americans have a positive view of capitalism. However, 92 percent have a positive view of ‘small business’, 86 percent have positive view of ‘entrepreneurs’ and 79 percent have a positive view of ‘free enterprise’. It also depends what is meant by ‘socialism’. Asked by Gallup to define socialism, a quarter of Democrats (and Republicans) said it meant equality; 13 percent of Democrats saw it as government services, such as free health care; around the same proportion thought that socialism implied government ownership. (About 6 percent believed that socialism meant being social, including activity on social media.)

Asked by Anderson Cooper to define socialism, Ocasio-Cortez replied: ‘What we have in mind and what my policies most closely re-resemble are what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden.’ But just how socialist is Sweden today? The country is 9th in the World Economic Forum’s Competitiveness ranking, 12th in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business league table, and 19th in Heritage’s Economic Freedom ladder. Many young Americans seem to have in mind the 1970s, rather than the present, when they wax lyrical about Swedish socialism.

So what does American socialism amount to? According to a Harvard poll, 66 percent of Gen Z support single-payer health care. Slightly fewer (63 percent) support making public colleges and universities tuition-free.

The same share supports Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal to create a federal jobs guarantee. Many Gen Z voters are not yet in the workforce, but nearly half (47 percent) support a ‘militant and powerful labour movement’. Millennial support for these policies is lower, but only slightly. Although wary of government in the abstract, young Americans nevertheless embrace it as the solution to the problems they perceive. Among voting-age members of Gen Z, seven in ten believe that the government ‘should do more to solve problems’ and ‘has a responsibility to guarantee health care to all’.

These polling results strongly suggest that what young Americans mean by ‘socialism’ is nothing of the kind. What they have in mind is not the state taking over ownership of the means of production, which is the true meaning of socialism. They merely aspire to policies on healthcare and education that imply a more European system of fiscal redistribution, with higher progressive taxation paying for cheaper or free healthcare and higher education. As figure 6 shows, OECD countries vary widely in the extent to which they reduce inequality by means of taxes and transfers. At one extreme is Chile, which only minimally reduces its Gini coefficient through its fiscal system; at the other is Ireland, which would be an even less egalitarian country than Chile without taxes and transfers, but which reduces inequality by more than any other OECD country through the various levers of fiscal policy. American voters may one day opt for an Irish level of egalitarianism, but it would be a mistake to regard this is a triumph for socialism. So long as it is a large private sector that is being taxed to pay for the benefits being disbursed to lower income groups, socialism is not le most juste .

A final cause of confusion that remains to be resolved is what to make of ‘ socialism with Chinese characteristics ’? According to the Economist, ‘The non-state sector contributes close to two-thirds of China’s GDP growth and eight-tenths of all new jobs.’ Clearly, the most dynamic Chinese corporations — Alibaba and Tencent, for example — are not state-owned enterprises. The state sector has shrunk in relative terms significantly since the beginning of economic reform in the late 1970s. A common conclusion drawn by many Western visitors is that China is now socialist in name only; functionally it is a capitalist economy.

One objection to that conclusion is that, since the accession to power of Xi Jinping , there has been a deliberate revival of the state sector. In 2012, for example, private sector companies received 52 percent of new loans issued by the official bank sector, compared with 32 percent to SOEs. But in 2016 private companies received just 11 percent of new loans, while more than 80 percent flowed to SOEs. The balance has shifted back in the other direction in more recent years, but the central government retains an option to direct credit in this discriminatory way, just as it relies on capital controls to prevent Chinese investors sending more money of their abroad, and on anti-corruption procedures to confiscate the property of officials and businessmen deemed to have transgressed.

Schumpeter largely omitted from his analysis an important variable which helps explain why socialism did not prevail in most countries in the second half of the twentieth century — namely, the rule of law. Because socialism at root means a violation of private property rights — the forced acquisition of assets by the state, with or without compensation — the most effective barrier to its spread is in fact an independent judiciary and a legal tradition that protects property owners from arbitrary confiscation.

A common error made in the wake of the 1989 revolutions was to argue that it was capitalism and democracy that were interdependent, whereas in reality it is capitalism and the rule of law. On this basis, it is striking not only that China is so much inferior to the United States by most measures in the World Justice Index, but also that Sweden is some way ahead of the United States.

The defining characteristic of socialist states is not their lack of democracy, but their lack of law. So long as China does not introduce a meaningful reform of the law — creating an independent judiciary and a truly free legal profession — all property rights in that country are contingent on the will of the Communist Party. It is perhaps worth adding that, precisely because property rights in a socialist state are so constrained, there is almost no limit to the negative externalities that can be foisted on citizens and neighbouring countries by polluting state enterprises (see figure 8).

Nearly eighty years ago, Schumpeter was right to identify the inbuilt weaknesses of capitalism and the strengths of socialism, and to perceive that democracy alone would not necessarily uphold the free market system. He correctly identified the enemies within, which would turn against capitalism even in its most propitious habitat, the United States.

He did not, however, spend enough time thinking about what institutions might be counted upon to defend capitalism against socialism. In a characteristically sarcastic passage setting out the supposed benefits of socialism, Schumpeter notes that: ‘A considerable part of the total work done by lawyers goes into the struggle of business with the state and its organs. It is immaterial whether we call this vicious obstruction of the common good or defence of the common good against vicious obstruction. In any case the fact remains that in socialist society there would be neither need nor room for this part of legal activity. The resulting saving is not satisfactorily measured by the fees of the lawyers who are thus engaged. That is inconsiderable. But not inconsiderable is the social loss from such unproductive employment of many of the best brains. Considering how terribly rare good brains are, their shifting to other employments might be of more than infinitesimal importance.’

Conspicuously, Schumpeter did not subsequently acknowledge that defending business against the state is in fact an economically beneficial activity, insofar as it upholds the rights of private property and makes it difficult to violate them. Perhaps he did not feel that he needed to state something so obvious. Yet sometimes it is the responsibility of a public intellectual to do just that.

What makes socialism pernicious is not so much the inefficiency that invariably attends state ownership of any asset, as the erosion of property rights that tends inevitably to be associated with the state’s acquisition of private assets. Where — as in Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s — socialists acquired a dominant political position without overthrowing property rights in pursuit of direct state ownership, it proved possible to roll it back, once the inefficiencies of state control became apparent. But where — as in China or Venezuela — the rule of law has essentially ceased to exist, such self-correction becomes almost impossible. The socialist economy can then go down only one of two possible paths: towards authoritarianism, to rein in the oligarchs and carpetbaggers, or towards anarchy. This is a lesson that young Americans might have been taught at college. It is unfortunate that, as Schumpeter predicted, the modern American university is about the last place one would choose to visit if one wished to learn the truth about the history of socialism.

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Capitalism And Freedom

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How does the impersonal nature of the market protect individual freedom and guard against discrimination?

Give an example of a paternalistic justification for an economic policy and discuss why Friedman opposes paternalism in policymaking.

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Does capitalism have a future? A review essay of Peter Boettke’s The Struggle for a Better World and Daniel Bromley’s Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism

Ilia murtazashvili.

Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA

In this review essay, I compare and contrast Peter Boettke’s The Struggle for a Better World (Mercatus Center, 2021) and Daniel Bromley’s Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019). Each of these books considers the future of capitalism. Boettke’s Struggle sees capitalism as the only morally and economically justifiable system but that continual effort is necessary to ensure the capitalist enterprise succeeds. Bromley’s Crisis sees capitalism as a spent force that no longer does what it was meant to do—namely, improve the economic well-being of households. There are surprisingly many points of agreement in these books, most notably a concern for the downtrodden in society and an appreciation for the legitimation crisis confronting capitalism. There are also important differences that will give anyone interested in the future of capitalism much to ponder. Boettke sees unconstrained government as the primary threat to legitimacy; Bromley identifies the possessive individualism that lies at the heart of our current capitalist system as the source of the crisis. Both books make a significant contribution to our understanding of the institutions governing capitalist economies and powerful arguments as we contemplate the future of capitalism.

Introduction

Does capitalism have a future? In this review essay, I compare and contrast two books that offer sweeping, insightful accounts of the past, present, and future of capitalism. Peter Boettke’s The Struggle for a Better World ( 2021 ) (hereafter Struggle ) is an eloquent defense of liberalism—a “doctrine of economic and political life grounded in the recognition that we are one another’s dignified equals, and that justice demands equal treatment of equals” (p. 7). Liberalism is about power for the people, not the privileged elites. Boettke’s collection of essays offers a superb defense of capitalism grounded in an appreciation for the way that spontaneous order makes the best use of the human imagination and a deep concern for the damage done when government becomes unshackled Leviathan.

Daniel Bromley’s Possessive Individualism: A Crisis of Capitalism ( 2019 ) (hereafter Crisis ) sees capitalism as a spent force because its concern with improving the well-being of households has been replaced by its singular focus on profiting by what Bromley calls “wrangler capitalists” – those capitalists who specialize in buying, selling, and reorganizing businesses (pp. 55–56). According to Bromley, the problem is possessive individualism: an overwhelming concern is to “stay focused on controlling costs,” much like what a comptroller does (p. 23). Economics used to be concerned with how households provide for themselves but has become preoccupied with the atomistic individual. Did, as Boettke suggests, and as Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden ( 2020 ) have persuasively argued, liberalism make us better and richer humans? Not so, for Bromley. We have more stuff, but what about the quality of our working lives? For many workers, the current situation is nothing to gloat about.

Each author speaks from a position of credibility as a scholar and institution builder. Boettke has done as much as anyone to advance contemporary Austrian economics. Bromley is known for work in the tradition of the so-called old institutionalists, such as John Commons. There are important differences between the traditions. For one, Austrians and institutionalists differ in their beliefs about general economic truths: Austrians think there are such truths but question whether mathematical formalism is the way to find them, while institutionalists, especially the old institutionalists, find such truths chimeral (Boettke et al., 2003 ).

Despite differences in their perspectives, these books have much in common. The shared framework should not come as much of a surprise. Though institutionalism is sometimes contrasted with institutionalism in economics, Austrians, as Boettke ( 1989a ) explains, are and always have been institutionalist. Austrian institutionalists such as Hayek and Mises are completely in agreement with the old institutionalists (and the new version) that the structure and scope of economics ought to be concerned first and foremost with “the consequences of alternative institutional arrangements” (Boettke, 1989b , p. 78). Simply put, Austrian economics is institutional economics (Palagashvili et al., 2017 ).

Besides a shared concern with institutions, each of these books recognizes a legitimacy crisis. Boettke’s Struggle begins by noting that trust in public institutions of governance, private institutions of finance and commerce, and social institutions of community are confronting a severe stress test. For example, George Floyd’s murder cannot be tolerated in a liberal society. Rust Belt cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh continue to grapple with economic malaise, despair, and addiction. True radical liberals, as Boettke explains, have inherited a problematic past and face a troubling present. There is no shortage of interesting work pointing out how we are so much better off now than in earlier centuries. But pointing out how economic freedom is associated with wealth does not really explain why there is so much anger, and the fact is that much of the world remains extremely poor. Boettke knows not all is well in society, though liberalism is not the problem.

Bromley’s Crisis is motivated in part by the recent electoral victory of populist leaders, including Donald Trump. Trump is a grifter, but this surprising victory was not a cause of the crisis. Trump, in Bromley’s words, is “merely a noxious messenger” (p. 232). Bromley contends that people are angry because managerial capitalism, with its emphasis on cutting costs, has failed them.

John Meadowcroft ( 2019 ) explains that James M. Buchanan was especially concerned with the status of the status quo. So too are Boettke and Bromley’s books. But their understandings of the causes differs. Boettke argues that public misconduct, not private misconduct, ruins nations. Unshackled Leviathan is the problem. For Bromley, the problem is capitalism.

My goal in this review essay is to consider where these books differ in their understanding of capitalism, their diagnosis of the problem giving rise to the legitimation crisis, and their suggestions about what ought to be done. It is not to choose one argument over another. Each of these books masterfully weaves together insights gained through the authors’ decades of careful inquiry on the nature of capitalism. Each shows a masterful understanding of institutions. I hope that anyone especially optimistic about capitalism will take Bromley’s critique seriously and that anyone especially optimistic about government’s ability to solve the problem will consider carefully Boettke’s impassioned arguments.

The rest of this essay is structured as follows. First, I suggest that an important difference is that Struggle focuses on capitalism as exchange of goods and services, while Crisis places much more emphasis on the transition from merchant capitalism to industrial, then financial, and then managerial capitalism. By the time we get to managerial capitalism, goods and services are still exchanged, but labor has far less bargaining power under the current system of capitalism than under previous ones. Next, I consider differences in how these books conceptualize the problem: Boettke’s issue is with government, while Bromley’s is with possessive individualism. Finally, I contrast the two authors’ advice about the future.

Capitalism or capitalisms?

Boettke’s Struggle places Adam Smith at the forefront. One might think this is an obvious starting point since we are concerned with economies. But anyone familiar with the typical PhD program’s course sequence in microeconomics will know that Smith is treated as a footnote in a course devoted mainly to proving one’s mathematical chops.

But ignoring Smith has significant costs, especially if we are concerned with vulnerable people. In Boettke’s hands, Smith becomes a figure much like Johnny Cash: someone profoundly concerned with the voiceless and the downtrodden. Liberalism, as Boettke explains, means extending a hand to strangers in order to lift the dispossessed and the desperate out of poverty. 1 Smith’s Wealth of Nations argued that individuals should be free from domination and that those who are more powerful should not determine the material conditions of those who have less power because no society can flourish if the greater part of its members are poor and miserable. This is the central theme in the liberal tradition. F.A. Hayek understood the liberal project as the abolition of privileges of the few that kept down the many. It is a point made explicitly in the 1956 edition of The Road to Serfdom “The essence of the liberal position is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others” ( 1956 [1994], p. xxxvi). In addition, in The Constitution of Liberty , Hayek states that the “true contrast to a reign of status is the reign of general and equal laws, of the rules which are the same for all, or, we might say, of the rule of leges in the original meaning of the Latin word for laws – leges that is, as opposed to the privi-leges ” (emphasis original, Hayek, 1960 , p. 154). Buchanan believed that the struggle for political liberalism is an effort to free individuals from the ruling elite. Boettke favorably references McCloskey’s Why Liberalism Works ( 2019 ) in noting that true liberalism means no racism, no imperialism, no unnecessary taxes, and no slaves at all. 2

Boettke’s essays ( Crisis is a collection of essays bookended by a wonderful introduction and conclusion) are exceptionally useful as a corrective to any argument that classical liberalism supports oppressive institutions such as slavery and segregation. Others have debunked such arguments (see, for example, Fleury and Marciano 2018 ). Struggle is not a direct response to those criticisms. Rather, it shows that Smith was an ardent defender of consent as a general organizing principle and an enemy of privilege as a means of organizing economic activities.

But could Smith have foreseen the evolution of capitalism? And should we place blame on government when capitalism and democracy seem so intrinsically bound up that it seems impossible to even separate them? 3 Bromley’s Crisis recognizes that the capitalism that Smith understood so well has changed a great deal since his time. And we know that the core of Bromley’s book is to analyze the transition from merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism to financial capitalism and, finally, to the managerial capitalism of today. These gradual shifts are characterized by “the primacy of a central personified medium—the entrepreneur of merchant capitalism, the engineer of industrial capitalism, the banker of financial capitalism, and the wrangler of today’s managerial capitalism” (emphasis original, p. 55). 4

Bromley’s description of capitalism is significant and useful, especially when we consider that Smith introduced new ideas about how we think about capital and capitalism. 5 Before Smith wrote about it, capital was a sum of money that was to be invested or had been invested. But then it became the things themselves – the goods traded. Conceptualizing of capital as physical things and capitalism as exchange was a historical sleight of hand, one with important consequences: it makes us lose track of the changes in capitalism since we become concerned with physical things rather than legal relationships and the rules governing capitalism.

Smith’s novel approach to capital and capitalism meant that the conversation about capitalism was often less institutionally rich than it could have been. This does not mean Smith had no role for institutions. Gary Anderson and Robert Tollison ( 1982 ) showed that Smith was critical of the English East Indian Company. Smith believed the problem was government failure rather than a market failure. And Nathan Rosenberg recognized Smith’s preoccupation with establishing the conditions under which market mechanisms operate most effectively and that tree operation of “certain impulses, motivations, and behavior patterns were calculated to thwart, rather than to reinforce, the beneficent operation of market forces” ( 1960 , p. 569). Institutions, including government ones, are necessary because cooperation is not inevitable. Rather, Smith’s institutionalism, like Boettke’s, focuses on the political side of the institutions governing capitalism as the problem. 6 Thus, when Smith speaks of capitalism requiring an appropriate constitutional framework, it is mostly about ensuring that the government limits its activities – a view quite similar to Boettke’s Struggle . Bromley, in contrast, is much more interested in the evolutionary stages of capitalism, and the consequences of these shifts.

What changes ought we to be concerned with? The rigid hierarchies of precapitalist relations came under pressure as labor’s bargaining power improved as a result of plague and warfare in the fourteenth century. By the end of the fourteenth century, most agricultural laborers had become quasi-independent agricultural entrepreneurs who were no longer willing to underwrite wars. Copyhold emerged as an institution – and with it, rental contracts to use land replaced in-kind payment for privileges to use land. Now lords held the king’s land and independent families held the lord’s land. Copyhold put us on the road to fee simple, the most complete property right. 7 This institutional development enabled the rise of merchant capitalism and the entrepreneur, but much would be lost as capitalism evolved. Workers lost control of their means of production (labor) with the rise of industrial capitalism and the factory system and the accompanying separation between owners of capital—commercial land, sophisticated machines, large factories—and owners of labor power. Labor then became a commodity to be bought and sold just like any other factor of production. McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity ( 2010 ) concerns how we talk about entrepreneurs. Bromley’s concern is with the rise of a body of compliant laborers whose lives are very different from those of entrepreneurs.

The factory system was not the only development. Financial capitalism—which came because industry at a massive scale required financing on a grand scale—introduced rapid movement of liquidity around the world. But that was not the end. In managerial capitalism, “the wrangler rules. The entrepreneur of merchant capitalism surrendered his autonomy to the engineer of industrial capitalism. The engineer was soon pushed aside by the money managers and bankers of financial capitalism. Now, it seems reasonable to suggest that the financial wizards are answerable to the wrangler. Someone very meticulous is now minding the store” (Bromley, p. 82).

Bromley then shifts to an argument that scholars interested in collective action will appreciate. He describes firms as hedgehogs and households as foxes. Hedgehogs know one thing and foxes know many. Households, under managerial capitalism, have to know many things, and some even have to hold several jobs. The firm, however, is an artificial construct with a singular goal: to lower costs. It is for this reason that the hedgehogs dominate the foxes; the foxes have no chance. Walmart and Amazon are too big to resist. The foxes face a much larger collective action problem, one that is exacerbated by the massive scale of capitalism.

Boettke’s essays do not focus as much as Crisis on the historical evolution of capitalism; rather, they focus on the importance of freedom of choice. Struggle defends significant figures such as Ludwig von Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Bromley counters the arguments of the great defenders of capitalism. Freedom of choice—not being forced to work a specific job—is a narrow conception of freedom. Freedom to choose means little if the choice set, which is shaped by institutions, is not of our choosing. Bromley puts it this way: living is good (we have more stuff to consume), but what about work life? Capitalism is thriving in some parts of urban areas, but anger with the current situation is especially pronounced in rural areas in the United States, Britain, and Western Europe. And outside of those countries, many countries have experienced little improvement in material conditions in the past several centuries. Some workers may enjoy the life of the fox, moving from job to job in the gig economy, but for many, there is despair: “The unavoidable consequence of possessive individualism is that capitalism no longer comprises a source of hope. It has evolved into a system—an ‘ism’—without a compelling moral basis for its continuation” (Bromley, p. 123).

These books thus differ in what they mean by capitalism: trade in goods and services (in Struggle ) or trade in labor (in Crisis ). However, each aspect of capitalism is significant, and so they are in a sense complementary contributions. Trade in goods and services has its benefits, though the increase in goods and services available to us comes with greater vulnerability for households excepting their greater consumption choices. Together, the books offer profound insight into the productive power of capital and its costs.

Another reason to praise Boettke’s and Bromley’s books is that they move beyond Thomas Piketty’s ( 2014 ) concern with the empirical relationship between inequality and capitalism in at least three ways. First, they remind us that any attempt to relate capitalism to inequality leaves out important changes in the nature of capitalism over the past several hundred years. This is significant because unless we understand which capitalism we are talking about, we may misdiagnose the problem. Second, Boettke and Bromley each recognize that anger and illegitimacy are based not on inequality but on vulnerability. They disagree about their source of the problems: for Boettke, vulnerability is a result of government or regulation; for Bromley, capitalism – specifically, what he calls wrangler capitalism (and before it, industrial capitalism – is the reason households struggle to find meaningful employment). Third, it is abundantly clear that the wealth tax suggested by Piketty and increasingly supported by politicians is a magic bullet. Rather, our focus, if we agree with Boettke, is that we ought to be concerned with political institutions (why should we expect that the revenues will be spent addressing the real problems?). And if we agree with Bromley, we ought to direct our concern to economic institutions, not simply fiscal policies (why should we expect a wealth tax will solve the problem of vulnerability, if managerial capitalism remains unimpeded?).

One term that does not come up much in either book is neoliberalism, and for good reason: the term is often used as a pejorative to criticize a certain group of economists. 8 Critics of “neoliberalism” would do well to consider carefully specifying what kind of capitalism they are talking about and whether they have accurately diagnosed the problem they see, and whether it works. 9 Bromley’s work suggests their concern is not so much with the recommendations of scholars such as Friedman as with the specific institutional features of capitalism as we currently experience it, while Boettke suggests that the problems they see may be government failures rather than problems with supposedly laissez-faire economic policies.

Is unshackled Leviathan or capitalism the problem?

Each offers a diagnosis of the problem. In Struggle , the diagnosis is public predation. In Crisis , it is possessive individualism and the collective action problem confronting workers in their dealings with firms.

In chapter 2 of Struggle , “Economics and Public Administration,” Boettke contends that an institutional framework is necessary to realize gains from exchange because of the paradox of government: addressing private predation opens the possibility of public predation. The fundamental cause of development—as viewed by scholars from Mises to McCloskey—is ideas about what to produce and how to produce it, as well as idea about what kinds of rules make savings and capital accumulation safe. That is, idea about how to govern ourselves.

Chapter 5 of Struggle (aptly titled “Is State Intervention in the Economy Inevitable?”) argues that government intervention in the economy is not inevitable but probable without restraints on government, given that the demand for state intervention is constant. Chapter 6 is a clearly written essay that eloquently argues that government overspends because it has too much power. Nor is the problem with the people. One of the things that comes out in this book is Boettke’s deep appreciation for the role of institutions as an explanation of our current situation. As Boettke explains, “Blaming public unions for asking for improved benefits from their members or blaming elected officials for responding to those demands in order to win votes is like criticizing a wasp for stinging you when you step on its nest. The problem isn’t the people; it is the institutional regime that produces the pattern of behavior” (Boettke, p. 126). Like Bromley, Boettke is concerned above all with institutions and their consequences.

Boettke, as we know from his Public Administration in the Classical Liberal Tradition (Aligica et al.,  2019 ), written with Paul Dragos Aligica and Vlad Tarko, is deeply appreciative of Vincent and Elinor Ostroms’ vision of public administration. The essays of Struggle show the evolution of many of the ideas in the earlier book. In the emergent view of public administration, the idea of a unitary state populated by omniscient and benevolent expert bureaucrats is rejected in favor of a view of government populated by ordinary individuals who have limited knowledge and respond to incentives. This is the Ostromian vision. The implication is clear: we ought to adjust our expectations of what to expect from bureaucrats. Public entrepreneurs are the ones with the vision required to make changes, though making changes requires that these entrepreneurs and those who they interact with have some autonomy. The problem is not government. Our central problem is that government has gotten out of hand and that we have collectively moved away from the Ostromian vision of self-governance as the unifying theme of public administration.

Most of the examples in Boettke’s book are examples of unshackled Leviathan doing bad things. This is most obvious in his reflections on the evils of what Geoffrey Hodgson ( 2019 ) calls “big” socialism: central planning. But so too are there many significant examples of government predation, including in policing—arguably one of the most significant examples of the predatory state in society. 10

Turning to Crisis , we direct our gaze to the problems arising from capitalism. Central to Bromley’s diagnosis of the problem is the parable of the fox and the hedgehog. As noted above, managerial capitalists are the hedgehogs; households and workers are the foxes. The foxes of the world have to deal with increasing atomization: “In a fully atomized world, the flowering of meritocratic processes then tends to threaten political coherence and a shared sense of purpose within a community. Meritocracies reward merit, but they also begin to generate institutional arrangements—public policies—that tend to reinforce such self-interested inclinations” (Bromley, p. 16).

Bromley points to economics as the dubious enabler of the hedgehogs. Economics shifted its concern from organization to the atomized individual. It was originally concerned with how individuals and societies organize to provide for themselves. The two key organizations are the household (which is natural) and the firm (which is artificial). But then formalism took hold, and the maximizing individual became sovereign. Possessive individualism is the view that individual rationality and the sanctity of the consumer are the most significant building blocks of the economy. This view overlooks that there had to be organizations in order for there to be something to trade. As far as I can tell, Bromley and Boettke are fully in agreement on the problems that arise from the Max U or “man as machine” approach in much of economics. 11

Crisis offers up possessive individualism as the cause of the current dissatisfaction with capitalism. Bromley engages a topic of concern to many in the Austrian tradition: do markets make us more virtuous than we would otherwise be? 12 Bromley summarizes the case that markets make us moral as follows. Market economies come to be composed of individuals who are socialized to master the virtuous character traits of market societies. These acquired traits are inevitable consequences of the need to orient one’s actions toward mutually advantageous social interactions, which are the reason why societies adopted markets in the first place.

Bromley’s response to the markets-as-moral-spaces argument is that its proponents are concerned only with buyers and sellers seeking to exchange commodities or services in a normal market. However, the desire to engage in market transactions is not itself a virtue, as many exchanges are repugnant and many choices are not good even for the individuals doing the choosing. Most significantly, most of these market transactions reapportion wealth rather than create new wealth.

Any focus on buying and selling is thus incomplete. Labor has been commodified, and many workers cling to the belief that they need choice. But workers now have fewer choices and much less bargaining power. The hedgehog dominates under managerial capitalism, and many foxes do not even know it, and when they do, they cannot really do much about it. This is not a problem that arises from government. Rather, it is a problem of capitalism; more fundamentally, the problem is that the ideology of possessive individualism has been wielded to justify the institutions that give rise to the anger that has contributed to deplorable phenomena such as Trumpism.

These books are also an invitation to additional empirical research. Bromley offers sweeping critiques of managerial capitalism, with a masterful institutional analysis of our current situation. But many of the contentions are empirical ones. Does the market erode social capital? Mark Pennington and John Meadowcroft ( 2008 ) find that spontaneous order produces bridging and bonding social capital. Art Carden recently notes that Walmart is not as bad as it seems, contrary to corporate dystopia narratives in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State ( 1967 ). While Walmart is one of the largest firms in the world by profits, its profits are only about one-tenth of one percent of US GDP (Carden, 2021 ). Carden’s empirical studies provide further evidence that Walmart is actually good – there is less hunger (Courtemanche & Carden, 2011 ), more art and leisure (Carden & Courtemanche, 2009 ), and no decline in social capital, such as club membership, in communities with a Walmart (Carden et al., 2009 ). One might see this as empirical evidence in support of Boettke, though for reasons noted, Bromley is certainly on to something, as the anger with the current work situation is still palpable, despite low prices.

It is straightforward to see how Bromley and Boettke differ. It is certainly true, as Boettke claims, that goods being reshuffled and reallocated in response to changes in prices can be a good thing—even a great thing, as we know from Amazon Prime getting many of us through the COVID-19 pandemic or from how the supply lines for toilet paper and paper towels came through despite the hoarding behavior of some customers. But what if we replace goods and services in the above account with workers reshuffled and reallocated in response to changes in prices? After all, the definitive change in capitalism as we moved from merchant capitalism to industrial capitalism is that the worker became a fictitious commodity. Foxes are not simply buying goods and services; they are goods and services. The point here is not to choose a side, but to note that the Industrial Revolution ensured that the question of what is being purchased would become not only about the stuff we want, but about labor.

Another difference worth noting is about embracing people with open arms. Libertarians will love Boettke’s characterization of welcoming strangers with an open hand. 13 Bromley’s perspective is a bit more nuanced. The reason why people want to come to countries such as the United States is not that they do not have market freedom. Many African countries have an abundance of market freedom, but that is not enough to provide political order. Nor is it clear that the open hand comes without costs. George Borjas ( 2016 ) has made this point in reflecting on immigration. Nor is xenophobia or racism the obvious reason why people support Trump, as some workers have rational reasons to worry about their situation with inflows of people (Murtazashvili et al., 2021 ). But this should be clear enough from any economics lesson on immigration, since the argument is about net benefits from immigration, not that every single person is better off with new entrants into the labor force. And we cannot necessarily rely on government to address the challenge that comes with new migrants to a region, as those who are left out do not always feel they have much voice in politics. Possessive individualism is part of the reason people want to leave one place; and in their destination, its pernicious effects on politics mean that those people may be subject to the same forces of insecurity and instability brought on by wrangler capitalists. Bromley’s point is that today’s immigrants might be the disaffected Rust Belt workers of tomorrow, and we ought to spend more time thinking about why the disaffected Rust Belt workers might be concerned about immigration beyond merely asserting that they are economically irrational or xenophobic racists.

What is to be done?

Struggle leaves no uncertainty about what is not to be done: “There is no justice to be achieved from socialism, only equality in misery and despair as daily life devolves into one of economic deprivation and political terror” (Boettke, p. 7). The case is made more fully in Boettke’s collection of essays titled Calculation and Coordination ( 2001 ). Socialism ought to be eliminated from the menu of potentially desirable organizational forms of economic, political, and social life. Chapter 13 (“Rebuilding the Liberal Project”) is more constructive in suggesting that the liberal project cannot be saved by repackaging a fixed doctrine of eternal truths. True liberalism faces a threat from conservative movements on the right and socialism on the left. In the US and the UK, the populist threat comes from both the Left and Right. Liberalism above all is about toleration. The answer to populism is toleration. Cosmopolitanism is the answer to populism. Boettke’s argument is a case for freedom to choose. 14 One of the reasons openness is justified is, per Julian Simon ( 1981 ), that the ultimate resource is human imagination.

Boettke’s concluding chapter provides one of the most eloquent defenses of the liberal society as an open society. Libertarian champions of economic freedom would do well to consider Boettke’s nuanced perspective on the current situation. At best, we have pockets of liberal commerce that raise living standards tremendously. At worst, we have power and privilege. There is a growing concern about global inequality. In the end, the struggle of ideas is about correcting two misconceptions: (1) the rich get rich at the expense of the poor, and (2) the poor do not get rich faster than the rich get richer. Critics point to neoliberalism as the problem. Boettke explains why we ought not to do that.

For Bromley, inequality is the intended result of possessive individualism, which compels individuals to pursue a livelihood strategy, including the types of jobs we choose and what we collectively expect of our workers, based on the celebration of rights and the illusory idea of being free to choose. Despite many individuals believing that individualism is the only and right way to organize society, they seem not to realize that they are at the mercy of capitalist firms equally committed to possessive individualism, and that when push comes to shove, the capitalists mostly win. Consumers, as Bromley notes, are often all too eager to denounce China for predatory trade policies while filling up their minivans with abundant clothing, toys, and plastic products from China. Lower prices are a good thing. But Bromley argues that that is not a good reason, but rather an excuse. The more honest reason why consumers continue the endless quest for bargains is the “enduring culturally prized urge toward persistent low-cost acquisitiveness” (p. 237).

Bromley is not engaging in Marxist false consciousness theorizing. Rather, it is an empirical statement that many of the policies individuals support contribute to the vulnerability of workers and that the fact that they have more choice does not eliminate the more general precarity of their work situation. Low-cost acquisitiveness has costs.

One might of course respond that individualism is not necessarily bad, especially when we think of individualism as inquisitiveness and hard work. Certainly the empirical literature finds that individualism is associated with greater wealth (see, for example, Williamson and Mathers 2011 ). Bromley’s criticism is different. Freedom has come to mean aggressively pursuing self-interest and desiring to make sure others do not have what we enjoy. Possessive individualism is not the social capital that Boettke and colleagues have so clearly shown to be significant in responding to crises (Boettke et al., 2007 ). Overcoming possessive individualism – crass individualism – requires us to recognize that we can reconstitute a market economy in the interest of greater equality and other-regarding behavior. The capitalist firm must be transformed into a public trust. However, this will not be sufficient. Improved livelihoods will also require that the possessive individual be reimagined.

Bromley notes that the word “community” is now used to separate us into silos, a practice facilitated by identity politics. Rather than separating ourselves, it is crucial to recognize that personhood requires a community that acknowledges one’s personhood. It requires engagement. But managerial capitalism denies the relevance of community. Mindless and numb workers are the new automatons. Ultimately we need exchange on equal terms since under managerial capitalism the fox always loses.

These books also discuss the future of economics as a science. One of Boettke’s contributions is demonstrating the ongoing significance of the classical liberal tradition. Economics has lost its way in its search for clever research designs and its focus on mathematics. Paradoxically, that makes it challenging for us to understand how people behave since the assumption of maximization eliminates volition (as well as makes challenge consideration of time, uncertainty, and ignorance).

Bromley is perhaps more critical of economics, especially the kind that sees efficiency as a guide to policy. To quote Bromley: “Efficiency is not and cannot possibly be a design criterion. The only approach to meaningful institutional change is to: (1) focus on careful diagnosis of problematic settings and circumstances; (2) entertain new ideas that seem most promising in solving a particular problem; (3) embrace the most reasonable of those possibilities; and (4) then undertake ex post monitoring and assessment as the new policies are allowed to run their course” (p. 123). Anyone who agrees with Peter Leeson’s ( 2020 ) and Yoram Barzel’s ( 2002 ) eloquent defense of the idea that maximization is a critical concept to economists ought to consider Bromley’s explanation why utility maximization cannot provide a guide for human action and why efficiency can never explain why we choose a specific policy. Rather, we need to appreciate that the process of institutional change is one of realizing our collective and shared futures through a process of reasoning about what works, what does not work, and how things can be better. 15

Is capitalism a liberal emancipatory project worth saving? Or is it a spent force? Boettke does a masterful job clarifying what capitalism does well, explaining the problems arising from centralized-government intervention in the economy, and reminding us of the evils of socialism. But all is not well in the kingdom. Work life is not great, and while nobody doubts that the Bourgeois Deal contributed to riches, it only made some rich. And anger in places such as the rural United States is not simply a consequence of unrestrained government. Capitalism is to blame, according to Bromley, but it is not Adam Smith’s capitalism. Managerial capitalism puts workers in a bind, and collective action does not favor the fox.

Despite these differences, there are similarities between Boettke’s Austrian institutionalism and Bromley’s old institutionalism. Each author sees institutions as the central concern for economics. Boettke is also a self-professed disciple of mainline economics, which includes public choice (clearly concerned with rules) and the Ostroms’ polycentric view (also concerned with rules). Still, one discerns a richness in Bromley’s analysis of institutions that one does not see as often in much of the mainline tradition, except perhaps for McCloskey’s work and, arguably, Boettke’s work on socialism. The greatest strength of Boettke’s essays may be in the institutional criticism of socialism, and Bromley’s most significant contribution is to discern the institutional problem with managerial capitalism. 16 In my view, these are complementary insights that counsel humility when assessing capitalism and socialism.

The institutional approach of these books has profound policy significance. Much of the current conversation in the post-COVID economy is about infrastructure—some version of a new Marshall Plan, but for the rich countries. This simplistic application of Keynesian reasoning, as these books make so clear, is insufficient because it does not appreciate that the problem is institutional. Boettke and Bromley differ in their diagnosis of the problem; they agree that institutions are the key, and neither proposes a magic bullet. They understand that the process of institutional change is a struggle. Boettke and Bromley also appreciate the significance of ideas in the process of institutional change. Ideas give rise to beliefs, and changes in beliefs ultimately lead to changes in institutions. Their appreciation for ideas, along with history, is too often pushed aside in economics these days.

There is an important difference when it comes to spontaneous order. Boettke, like the great Austrians before him, appreciates spontaneous order. Hayek famously divided orders into planned and spontaneous orders. Hayek of course followed Menger’s distinction between organic and pragmatic orders. Austrian economists tend to see spontaneous orders as the more interesting aspect of social science, while old and new institutionalists tend to see directed orders as more significant, in part because such orders vary so much. Hayek also thought spontaneous order was the most interesting aspect of social science. Bromley shows why there is much we do not understand about the planned orders that are so important to capitalist economies and that there is nothing simple about understanding why and how planner orders work. But Boettke does not succumb to the view that only spontaneous order is interesting or try to define everything as a spontaneous order. Unlike many of the earlier Austrians, who were content to praise the virtues of the market, Boettke has a deep appreciation for Vincent Ostrom’s insights into public administration and therefore appreciates the problem of explaining the success of directed orders. Thus, each book can be thought of as a major contribution to institutionalism, however we define it.

Anyone interested in the future of capitalism will be better off after reading these books. The books could be read as a defense of markets and criticism of government by an Austrian–public choice economist versus an impassioned criticism of capitalism by a disciple of the progressive John Commons. But that would be a mistake. Each book illustrates a deep commitment to institutional analysis and offers a wealth of knowledge about how to compare institutions. They both put institutional analysis at the forefront of economics, where it should be. There is no Max U in either of these impressive books. The perspectives are very much complementary. The battle for the future of capitalism is indeed a battle of ideas, and the ideas in these books give us much to reflect on.

Acknowledgments

I had the idea to write this essay after a book talk by Dan Bromley at the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh in March 2021. Mark Pennington served as a discussant for the seminar, and his willingness to engage Dan’s book constructively was a breath of fresh air. Mark’s constructive dialogue reminded me how much can be gained by carefully considering work with which we disagree. Since I had been reading Pete Boettke’s book at the time, it seemed natural to continue that conversation by comparing and contrasting these books. I thank Rosolino Candela for encouraging me to write this piece and for offering extensive and thoughtful suggestions on the essay. Thanks to Nick Cowen, Rabih Helou, and Jen Murtazashvili reding and commenting on the essay and Art Carden for sharing some of his recent work on Walmart that fit nicely with the themes of this essay. Most importantly, thanks to Dan and Pete for their mentorship over the years and for inspiring so many of us.

1 See also William Easterly’s ( 2020 ) brilliant essay on Adam Smith’s anticolonialism.

2 Boettke might also have added W.H. Hutt to the list of liberals against racism, as Hutt’s impassioned critique of apartheid was based on an appreciation for consumer sovereignty (Magness et al., forthcoming ).

3 Randall Holcombe’s ( 2018 ) concept of political capitalism also gets at Bromley’s concern about the close relationship between economic and political elites in capitalist democracies.

4 One could, as Aligica and Tarko ( 2015 ) suggest, simply do away with the notion of capitalism and recognize that we are dealing with capitalisms: crony capitalism, state capitalism, and so on. Bromley’s classification of capitalisms is a useful complement to the ones familiar to those in the public choice literature.

5 Two excellent books on the meaning of capitalism and the significance of legal rules are Geoffrey Hodgson’s Conceptualizing Capitalism (2015) and Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital ( 2019 ).

6 If there’s a limitation with Smith’s view, it may be that he did not anticipate how well self-governance works when people have these conflicts of interests. Peter Leeson’s Anarchy Unbound ( 2014 ) shows just how well it works, and why.

7 Though much attention is paid to fee simple, the most significant conclusion of the property rights approach regardless of school of thought—Austrian, public choice, or Ostromian—is that the most appropriate property regime is one that evolves in response to local conditions (Harris et al., 2020 ).

8 Nick Cowen’s ( 2021 ) perspective offers a compelling and productive framework that eschews the desire to see neoliberalism as a bogeyman standing in for policies one wishes to criticize.

9 For an excellent discussion of the history of the term neoliberalism, see Leeson and Harris ( Forthcoming ). They also explain why there is no good reason to see Hayek as a neoliberal who only argued for market fundamentalism. Some of Hayek’s writing were very much opposed to state efforts to implement markets, as Hayek of course understood the knowledge problem of doing so.

10 Brandon Davis ( 2021 ) explicitly places the American carceral state in the framework of the predatory state.

11 Indeed, Boettke et al. ( 2003 ) contend that only the Austrians and old institutionalists truly put people at the forefront of analysis.

12 Anyone looking for a response to Bromley’s criticism would do well to consider Ginny Choi and Virgil Storr’s Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals ? ( 2019 ).

13 Ben Powell and Alex Nowrasteh ( 2020 ) make an important case that the benefits of immigration exceed its costs.

14 Ilya Somin’s ( 2020 ) discussion of foot voting fits nicely with the defense of freedom to choose: through foot voting, people can choose better institutions, including political ones, and contribute to greater political freedom. Foot voting is just limited to voting, but where one lives, among other things.

15 Bromley’s Sufficient Reason ( 2006 ) more fully develops this argument about beliefs and the process of institutional change.

16 It would probably make the most sense to accept Smith as the first institutionalist, given his concern with the constitutional rules necessary for a well-functioning market, as Geoffrey Brennan and Buchanan ( 1985 ) argued.

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About Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.

The main characteristics of capitalism are capital accumulation, voluntary exchange, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, and wage labor.

There are six types of capitalism: oligarchic capitalism, state-guided capitalism, corporate capitalism, entrepreneurial capitalism, laissez-faire capitalism, and welfare capitalism.

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