A review of
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014) by Edward Baptist
Recent polling of the millennials’ attitudes toward socialism
suggests that higher education on the postmodern campus has better
prepared graduates to denounce capitalism than to defend it.
Undergraduate enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid speaks to
the point.
In 1946,
Encyclopedia Britannica recruited to the task of
explaining capitalism’s origin, meaning, and development the eminent
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter supplied a
characteristically learned and incisive entry that sharply distinguished
societies with features of capitalism from those with a full-blown
capitalist system. Thus, the appearance of a high level of
commercialization in a society or empire, the arbitraging or acquisitive
behavior of elites or other social strata in well-articulated
markets—ancient Rome, for example—did not necessarily indicate the
presence of capitalism. A capitalist society, he said, has at its core
the “private ownership of nonpersonal means of production.”
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NYT: Working endlessly to convert our country to Communism
