The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby (review)

With the world economy reeling and the European Union undergoing financial upheaval, Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution is more than timely. Her synthetic history of the remarkably dynamic yet uneven, punctuated, and crisis-prone development of capitalism moves through several centuries, exploring a broad array of phenomena, landscapes, individuals, and technologies. Appleby weaves these threads into a wide-ranging story, making a strong case for placing capitalism at the core of our understanding of modern history.

Unlike other scholars, most recently Niall Ferguson, who have attributed economic development to a set of universally replicable mechanisms, Appleby emphasizes the historically specific and polymorphous nature of capitalism. Exploring variations such as market-driven capitalism in England, managerial “industrial leviathans” in the United States and Germany, and accelerated government-directed development in Japan, she stresses that capitalism was never monolithic. Nor was it ever purely a commercial or industrial system. Appleby defines capitalism broadly as a “cultural system rooted in economic practices that rotate around the imperative of private investors to turn a profit” (p. 25). Far from spontaneous and rooted in human nature, and more than just an economic arrangement, this system emerged when “entrepreneurs and their supporters acquired the power to bend political and social institutions to their demands” (p. 118). The capitalist marketplace has thus always been politically and socially constituted and deeply embedded in beliefs and social norms.

In keeping with these premises, the book’s scope expands far beyond entrepreneurs and business executives. It incorporates into the story a wide range of historical actors, including statesmen, intellectuals, and labor leaders. Political events mark important turning points in the narrative. Ideas have a great deal of autonomy and shape the development of the system. The usual suspects—men such as Andrew Carnegie, August Thyssen, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton—appear here alongside Alexander Hamilton, Ida Tarbell, Samuel Gompers, Mustafa Atatürk, Nikola Tesla, Hannah Arendt, and Milton Friedman. The modern political economy, Appleby shows, was made not only on production floors and in corporate boardrooms and department stores but also, crucially, within political institutions, on bloody battlefields, and in the realm of cultural production. For a book about capitalism, we learn surprisingly little about the intricacies of commerce or production. The analysis focuses instead on the transformative effects that modern business practices had on human society and the everyday life of ordinary people around the world.

For Appleby, capitalism’s ability to overturn traditional practices has been its essential and most attractive quality. Unfortunately, her unmitigated optimism about the emancipatory effects of this process often overwhelms the analysis. Her prose exudes enthusiasm when she describes the unmaking of preexisting regimes and capitalism’s ability to generate previously unthinkable wealth. She brilliantly historicizes Adam Smith’s radical recasting of human nature itself, inaugurating a new view of human beings as rational economic actors. She is far less persuasive, however, when she proposes that the new ethic of capitalist development released “pent up” potential, that new ideas about political economy “broke free” of old orthodoxies, or that pre-revolutionary France was plagued by “a byzantine maze” of feudal restrictions (pp. 7, 96, 84). This teleological language (sprinkled throughout the narrative) echoes Smith, undermining the historically specific understanding of capitalism that the book ostensibly seeks to advance.

Even less satisfying in this account are the parts about the darker side of the story. Never shying away, the book describes in detail the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade, the rapacity of European imperialism, and the wrenching social dislocations generated by new market relations. Appleby presents these episodes as central to the history of capitalism. Nevertheless, the narrative shrugs them off as regrettable detours on an otherwise progressive path. A few grudging concessions aside, capitalism emerges as a benign harbinger of a liberal society. In this account, to take but one example, European colonization in Africa was driven not by the fully rational imperatives of capital accumulation but by much baser impulses such as the Europeans...