When Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump draw from the same economic anger, when inequalities return to their pre-1929 levels, when capitalism traverses a crisis of legitimacy unprecedented in a century, it becomes urgent to understand how we arrived here. John Cassidy’s new book proposes a key to interpretation: the history of capitalism through its most perceptive critics.
The Author
John Cassidy embodies a rare form of economic journalism: one that combines academic rigor with narrative clarity. Born in Leeds in 1963, a graduate of Oxford in 1984, he studied journalism at Columbia and economics at New York University before becoming one of the world’s most respected economic journalists. A staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995, his work bridges academic rigor and public discourse, dissecting complex economic phenomena for a broad audience.
Cassidy had already demonstrated his capacity to grasp crises of capitalism with How Markets Fail (2009), an analysis of the 2008 financial crisis. But it was in 2016, facing the simultaneous rise of Trump and Sanders, that he realized something profound was happening: “The postwar system seemed to have foundered. You saw populism rising. There were polls showing that, at least among young people, socialism was as popular as capitalism in the United States.” This journalistic intuition led him to undertake an eight-year historical inquiry.
The Central Thesis: Capitalism as an Adaptive System
Cassidy formulates his thesis from the introduction: “In reducing things, I was greatly aided by the fact that, across the centuries, the central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable and destructive, yet still all-conquering and crushing.” But contrary to a frontal critique, Cassidy adopts an original perspective: showing how capitalism survived precisely by integrating its critics.
His masterful synthesis of history and biography serves to demonstrate that capitalism is in a state of permanent change, not only because of its fundamental nature, but because it is continually subject to resistance. This adaptability explains its resilience in the face of repeated predictions of its collapse.
The author structures his narrative around 29 critical thinkers, from Adam Smith (1770) to contemporary advocates of degrowth. Each chapter reveals how a specific critique pushed the system to reform: the Luddites accelerated negotiations over working conditions, Marx inspired twentieth-century social policies, Keynes legitimized state intervention.
Forces of Resistance: From Machine-Breaking to Algorithms
Cassidy’s first key argument concerns the persistence of resistances to capitalism. Beginning around 1770 with the rise of the cotton industry and scandals surrounding the East India Company—bailed out “exactly as the big banks were in 2008”—he shows that each technical innovation generates its own opposition.
The Luddites of 1812 did not destroy machines out of obscurantism, but defended their means of subsistence against automation. This dynamic perpetuates itself: as Cassidy writes, echoing Italian activist Silvia Federici, domestic labor “generally unpaid and performed by women” remains indispensable to capitalism’s functioning. The feminist critique reveals a form of invisible exploitation that the system still struggles to integrate.
The book excels at showing how overlooked figures have nourished contemporary debates. William Thompson, Irish proto-socialist who influenced Marx. Flora Tristan, who theorized the universal union of workers. J.C. Kumarappa, Gandhian economist advocating self-sufficiency against British colonialism. Their intuitions irrigate current movements for degrowth and circular economy.
Permanent Adaptation: Capitalism’s Art of Recuperation
The second argument reveals the system’s adaptive genius. Cassidy identifies a fundamental tension between necessary reforms of capitalism and the idea that it is corroded by contradictions that must ultimately lead to its implosion and disappearance. Contrary to Marxist predictions, capitalism never collapsed under its own contradictions. It internalized them.
The American example illustrates this capacity for adaptation: from the 1940s to the 1970s, “the real incomes of popular and middle classes increased faster than those at the top, and this dynamic was instrumental in avoiding the gravedigger scenario predicted by Marx.”
Cassidy’s analysis of the global economy and the persistence of gender inequalities at work finds its historical illumination here: each social conquest results from a negotiation between forces of contestation and system necessities.
But this adaptability has limits. Paul Sweezy and Michal Kalecki had identified a crucial blind spot in Keynesian solutions: their “defective assumptions about the relationship, or perhaps one should say the absence of relationship, between the economy and political action. Keynesians wrench the economic system from its social context and treat it as though it were a machine to be sent to a repair shop to be overhauled by an engineer state.”
The Populist Moment: When Adaptation Reaches Its Limits
Cassidy’s third argument directly illuminates our era. There exists today “a profound sentiment of discontent with capitalism, and the conviction that the two paradigms of political economy that have dominated the West since World War II—Keynesian social democracy on the one hand and market-oriented neoliberalism on the other—no longer work.”
This analysis resonates with transformations observed in independent publishing, which transforms sectoral crisis into competitive advantage: old models give way before new actors who circumvent established structures.
Thomas Piketty, analyzed in detail by Cassidy, formulates the conclusion unambiguously: “without deliberate political intervention through progressive taxation, redistribution, and public investment, inequality will worsen until it undermines democracy itself. Hence Piketty’s Question: if we now know that capitalism naturally produces inequality faster than growth can correct it, why do we still design policies that entrench it?”
Blind Spots: Between Methodological Optimism and Political Naïveté
Cassidy shines through his historical synthesis, but his approach reveals important limitations. As a New Yorker journalist, he “doesn’t go that far. He presents and explains this tension with a wealth of highly readable detail, but leaves its application to the current state of capitalism to our appreciation.” This journalistic neutrality becomes problematic when the magnitude of the crisis would require sharper positions.
The author also underestimates the contemporary geopolitical dimension. His analysis remains largely centered on the West, whereas the emergence of authoritarian capitalistic models (China) or hybrid ones transforms the terms. Critics from the Global South, though evoked through Latin American dependentistas, would merit more substantive development.
More fundamentally, Cassidy shares the reformist optimism he describes: the idea that capitalism can indefinitely adapt. But as economist Jeff Faux emphasizes, “to avoid the apocalyptic conclusion of Marx, he sidesteps a central implication of his own analysis: that the upward redistribution of wealth also generates an upward distribution of political power that perpetuates inequality.” Adaptation has its systemic limits.
Why Read It
Capitalism and Its Critics addresses three distinct audiences. For economists and political scientists, it offers a masterful synthesis linking 250 years of critical thought. The breadth of erudition—from Smith to Piketty by way of Rosa Luxemburg and Joan Robinson—makes it a unique reference manual.
For citizens seeking to understand the historical roots of our current crises, Cassidy proposes an accessible narrative without oversimplification. His journalistic style renders complex theories digestible while preserving their nuances. Unlike activist essays, it avoids ideological shortcuts.
Finally, for policymakers, the book provides a cartography of capitalism’s structural tensions. As Becca Rothfeld notes in the Washington Post, “Cassidy doesn’t answer these questions, but his gratifying book offers a remarkably lucid guide to a fascinating array of attempts to do so.”
What is found nowhere else is this long historical perspective on capitalist adaptability. Where contemporary critiques focus on current symptoms, Cassidy reveals the system’s deep mechanisms of transformation. His major contribution: showing that understanding capitalism requires understanding its critics.
Bibliographic Information
- Title: Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
- Author: John Cassidy
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication: 2025, 656 pages