Review: The Mind and the Market

‘The Mind and The Market: Capitalism in Western Thought’ by Jerry Z. Muller

In The Mind and The Market, Jerry Muller attempts to give an overview of Western views about the ‘market’ driven economy from Antiquity through the 20th Century. I found this book to be an excellent overview of the debates over capitalism (a term that Marx popularized), and significant views on the “moral implications and ramifications of the market”. Muller fairly presents liberal views on the benefit of the market along with Marxist, nationalist, conservative, and romantic critiques. Each view is presented within its context, but Muller finds that many of the same concerns continue to repeat throughout history, alternatively as benefits or downsides of capitalism.

Muller places a particular emphasis on German intellectuals, an intellectual history that is the author’s specialty. Perhaps the strongest section is Muller’s discussion of German intellectuals of the pre-World War I and interwar years. In the Austro-German context, capitalism went from precarious ascendance at the turn of the century to being almost universally viewed with hostility after the first war.

This book is not so much a discussion of the history of economic theory as a history of philosophy of the market. As a result, Keynes surprising only gets half of a chapter. Almost all the intellectuals mentioned in this book admit that capitalism had greatly increased the material well being of society. But, what has most worried thinkers throughout history has been the effects of the market on moral, cultural, and political values. People have long agonized over the effect of the market on institutions like the church, family and the nation. Modern commentators have a tendency to reinvent these concerns and overrate the novelty of modern problems. The arguments of Justus Möser fighting the decline of feudal society, and the breakdown of the traditional order, don’t sound that far off from a modern trade unionist. There is little popular romance about capitalism, so its driving force has always had to be that it is the most efficient system. Schumpeter would point out that capitalism is always breaking down and rebuilding society. This is certainly for the long-term material good of about everyone, but in the short term it creates constant enemies of those who are on the wrong side of “creative destruction”.

8/10 – Recommended