Comment and Controversy

The Editors:

Fritz Ringer's review of my book, The Mind and the Market, violates the standards of accuracy and objectivity that one expects from any scholarly journal, not to speak of one as distinguished as the JIH.¹ As a longtime reader of the journal—indeed, as one whose conception of history has been deeply influenced by the JIH—I cannot recall another instance like it. I find myself particularly distressed because the book makes use of economic, social, political, and demographic historical contexts to a degree rare in the contemporary writing of intellectual history. The review makes no mention of this fact whatsoever. Indeed, it makes no attempt to convey to readers what the book is about, namely, the ways in which a wide variety of modern European intellectuals from the early eighteenth through the late twentieth century thought about the moral, cultural, social, and political implications of changing forms of capitalism. It does so by focusing on some fifteen intellectuals, from across the political spectrum, and by explicating their ideas with reference to their relevant contexts. Operating on the premise that capitalism is too important a topic to be left only to economists, past and present, the book deliberately includes the views on markets or capitalism of intellectuals not primarily thought of as analysts of capitalism, including Voltaire, Edmund Burke, Georg W. F. Hegel, Matthew Arnold, and others.

After an initial paragraph that gives a reasonable account of my treatment of Adam Smith (the subject of the book's third chapter), Ringer's review takes a series of ever-more curious turns. He criticizes (without explaining) the book's explication of the views of two late eighteenth-century conservative thinkers, Justus Möser and Burke, with the odd remark that "Burke and Möser were social and political conservatives, not economic commentators"—as if one category excluded the other, and despite the book's demonstration that they both wrote profusely on subjects such as the effects of international trade, the East India Company, and the destabilizing role of some varieties of entrepreneurship. Ringer then describes the book's chapter on Karl Marx as "accusing Marx of disloyalty to his Jewish heritage" and "as distressingly personal and close to vicious." The former charge is made up of whole cloth, as the book makes no such claim. As for the "distressingly personal" treatment, the chapter does try to provide the relevant biographical background. But much of it is devoted to explaining the economic and demographic developments that led Marx to believe that capitalism was headed for crisis in the 1840s, as well as the philosophical influences that led him to embrace the labor theory of value at a time when it was being abandoned by most economic analysts.

Ringer's "review" also attributes views to me that the book discusses but does not endorse ("the economic individualism that is at the center of Muller's own commitments") and makes further claims that are wholly invented, such as the notion that the book uses the terms "liberal" and "intellectual" in a pejorative sense. Ringer devotes his final paragraphs to declaring his own "contrary allegiances, which are to Weber, to reason, to society, to value pluralism, and to an individualism not limited to economic agency" (he leaves out apple pie).

Why the readers of the JIH should be interested in Ringer's allegiances—or his fanciful speculations about mine—is a mystery. But those interested in the history of capitalism and how modern European intellectuals have thought about it might want to consult the review of the book by Sheri Berman—Foreign Affairs, LXXXII (2003), 176–181—in which she comments, "Muller's masterful sketches of intellectuals from across the political spectrum help put today's battles over globalization in proper historical perspective"; or the review by Charles Tilly—American Historical Review, CIX (2004), 246—in which he concludes, "Muller's history of reflections on market society since Voltaire opens up important questions about modernity in general." If they have...