He Doesn't Approve.

AuthorCarden, Art

The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity By Eugene McCarraher 799 pp.; Belknap Press, 2019

In roughly the last two decades or so, there has developed among historians a body of research known as the "New History of Capitalism," an often-critical look at race, gender and the power dynamics in capitalism. Eugene McCarraher's The Enchantments of Mammon joins too many contributions to this literature in being defiantly uninterested in anything economists and economic historians have written that might show the benefits of markets. Granted, these books sometimes discuss economists and their work, but not as scholars and ideas to be evaluated on the merits of their logical consistency or empirical accuracy but as demons to be defeated and dogmas to be denounced.

Big promises/I will highlight the good, the bad, and the ugly in The Enchantments of Mammon. First, the good: as befits an 800page work of history that took the author some two decades to write, it is filled with useful and interesting facts, fascinating characters, and intriguing references. In reading it I found my own list of things to read growing and growing--enough, I think, to keep me occupied for the next 20 years if I set my mind to it. McCarraher sketches out his thesis in the context of a detailed history of business literature and personalities who argue--as Deirdre McCloskey and I do in our own forthcoming book--that there is nothing necessarily wrong with buying, selling, and innovating.

McCarraher also explores and explains the ideas of Romantic critics of capitalism like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, who "turned to precapitalist values and cultures for inspiration." He does not gloss over Carlyle and Ruskin's racist views, noting that Carlyle's denunciation of economics as "the dismal science" was part of his defense of slavery, and he is admirably frank about how "this book partakes unashamedly of [Ruskin's] sacramental Romanticism." Readers will learn a lot about how the capitalist world looks through the transcendent frame of Romanticism.

The book begins promisingly enough. McCarraher writes, "Far from being an agent of 'disenchantment,' capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity." He promises "an extended assay of the moral and metaphysical imagination: our ideals of self and the common good that emerge from the way we...

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