A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000

Rating:
Summary: Marxist-Leninist Claptrap
Review: I bought this book hoping to fill in some missing pieces in my understanding of European history. I was sorely disappointed.

Michel Beaud's "History of Capitalism" is an orthodox Marxist-Leninist tract, obviously written in the late 1970s, with a more recently-written final chapter tacked on that addresses contemporary concerns in a knee-jerk liberal manner. Despite its author's professed familiarity with "analyses [that] questioned the simplistic certitudes of Marxist dogma," his own book does not.

Every paragraph on every page is devoted to repeating words and phrases that are seldom seen anymore in serious works of history or economics: "surplus labor," "exploitation" "proletariate," "rent in labor," etc. The illustrations, also not updated since the 1970s, look like they came from a high school textbook.

Beaud considers Lenin to be a reliable historian and quotes him as such. Non-Marxist thinkers -- indeed, any credible intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s -- rarely appear in this book and are never engaged intellectually. The final chapter is just silly: alarmist environmentalist predictions, denial that the collapse of the USSR tells us anything about the workabililty of socialism, promises that a new "crisis" is around the corner, etc.

Readers looking for a history of capitalism shouldn't waste their time with Beaud, and instead should turn to "The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought," by Jerry Z. Muller. The difference between the two books is tremendous; it is impossible to take Beaud seriously when one has read Muller.

Rating:
Summary: Marxist-Leninist Claptrap
Review: I bought this book hoping to fill in some missing pieces in my understanding of European history. I was sorely disappointed.

Michel Beaud's "History of Capitalism" is an orthodox Marxist-Leninist tract, obviously written in the late 1970s, with a more recently-written final chapter tacked on that addresses contemporary concerns in a knee-jerk liberal manner. Despite its author's professed familiarity with "analyses [that] questioned the simplistic certitudes of Marxist dogma," his own book does not.

Every paragraph on every page is devoted to repeating words and phrases that are seldom seen anymore in serious works of history or economics: "surplus labor," "exploitation" "proletariate," "rent in labor," etc. The illustrations, also not updated since the 1970s, look like they came from a high school textbook.

Beaud considers Lenin to be a reliable historian and quotes him as such. Non-Marxist thinkers -- indeed, any credible intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s and 1990s -- rarely appear in this book and are never engaged intellectually. The final chapter is just silly: alarmist environmentalist predictions, denial that the collapse of the USSR tells us anything about the workabililty of socialism, promises that a new "crisis" is around the corner, etc.

Readers looking for a history of capitalism shouldn't waste their time with Beaud, and instead should turn to "The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought," by Jerry Z. Muller. The difference between the two books is tremendous; it is impossible to take Beaud seriously when one has read Muller.