Magisterial ... [Cassidy] sheds light on the feedback loop between theory and practice ... Deftly glossed ... Cassidy could not have predicted Donald Trump’s particular brand of tariff inanity, but he comes uncannily close when he speculates that globalism may be on its last legs ... His rewarding book provides an impressively lucid guide to a fascinating array of attempts to do so ... Subtle and sensitive.
An expansive history of capitalism that places less emphasis on economic abstractions like perfectly competitive markets and draws attention instead to how often capitalist systems have fallen short ... The most haunting figure in this book is an outlier: Thomas Carlyle, the 19th-century Scottish essayist, whose assumptions about both capitalism and humanity were so dark that he made no room for the possibility of social progress.
A marvellously lucid overview of capitalism’s critics, written in good old-fashioned expository prose—if at times a touch workmanlike compared with some of his subjects, such as exhilarating stylists Marx and Carlyle ... This is by far the best primer I have read on the luminaries of the economic left.
