• Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought, New York: Anchor Books, 2002, 487 pages.
RALEIGH – Use it or lose it. That’s the prevalent rule of thumb in life, unfortunately, more so than the old adage about never forgetting how to ride a bicycle. Yes, you can peddle if you haven’t been on a bike since banana seats and baseball cards in the spokes. But you’ll be lucky to make through the neighborhood unless you’ve kept in shape. We don’t ride bikes to demonstrate our ability to balance ourselves on two wheels, an ability that may well survive a lengthy period of disuse. We ride bikes to get places or enjoy ourselves, and there’s no question that these abilities grow with practice.
There’s a similar dynamic at work when it comes to stretching our intellectual muscles. For all the talk about the importance of reading Great Books, experiencing great art, and thinking great thoughts when we are young, it is an inescapable fact that much of the knowledge we gain in high school or college dissipates unless we have occasion to use it.
Sorry to be such a downer – I actually have good news on this front. If you ever feel the need for a refresher course on some of the great philosophers and economists of the past two centuries, Jerry Muller’s interesting The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought might be just the intellectual bike ride for you. Muller’s goal is rather different, and also realized, at least partially. He wants the reader to appreciate the varying takes on free-market capitalism among the major philosophical schools and thinkers within European culture.
Muller sets the stage with a brief but satisfying excursion into ancient and medieval thought. Two critiques of proto-capitalism emerged during the period: a religious skepticism about profit and markets, much of it based on misreadings and mistranslations of scripture (that’s my point, not Muller’s); and a tradition of “civic republicanism,” encompassing ancient philosophers and medieval propagandists, who viewed economic matters as necessarily subservient to political and cultural imperatives.
The book then embarks on a series of discussions of the personal biographies and writings of a dazzling array of thinkers. Some are famous among laymen – Voltaire, Smith, Burke, Hegel, Marx, Keynes, Marcuse, and Hayek – and some are lesser-known but historically significant, such as Justus Moser, Verner Sombart, and Georg Lukacs. If The Mind and the Market offered nothing else than a short course on each of these gentlemen and their contributions, it would be well worth a read.
Happily, there is more. Muller’s discussion of Adam Smith is welcome because it includes not just The Wealth of Nations but also his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Given that Smith was a moral philosopher, not really an “economist” in the modern sense of the term, I think his insights are far richer when read in this context. Muller also explores Smith’s views about the proper scope of government in a more serious way than many modern-day conservatives and libertarians do (it’s fine to disagree with Smith, of course, but at least get his views right, first).
Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich Hayek, of the Austrian school of economics, get their due in The Mind and the Market, which is about time. Karl Marx gets fair and respectful treatment, which still leads inevitably to giggles by the end of the chapter (Marx was a talented, clever nincompoop, you see, even if read fairly). I particularly enjoyed Muller’s account of how writer Matthew Arnold attempted to square the reality of a market-induced economic boom in 19th-century England with Arnold’s concern about preserving social and aesthetic standards of excellence against what he perceived to be populist philistinism. As they became more influential in English society, Arnold “feared that the commercial middle classes would ‘deteriorate’ the country by ‘their low ideals and want of culture,’” Muller writes. Arnold was fond of quoting Aristotle’s observation that “the difficulty of democracy is how to find and keep high ideals.”
A main theme running throughout the book is that, whatever their differences in outlook or philosophical principles, competent critics of capitalism from both the Left and the Right granted that it was the most productive economic system in history. Unfortunately, during the 20th century writers such as John Maynard Keynes convinced generations of politicians that they could actually make their countries more prosperous by regulating markets and taxing productive people more. The results were economically disastrous. It would have been far better for all of us if European and American malcontents had limited themselves, as Arnold did, to fretting about whether mass markets can produce high-quality novels.
The answer is yes, by the way.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.