A Global Storm in a Capitalist Teacup?

“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman

Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher used to annoyingly say. Although Adelman, certainly no Thatcherite, isn’t celebrating the apparent inevitability of our capitalist epoch.

What interests Adelman is the making and unmaking of what he calls the “global mind.” The revolutionary quality of capitalism, he says, is that we now think of strangers as somehow part of our community. So when Adam Smith, the moral philosopher father of economics, drank his Chinese tea while reading of a deadly earthquake in China, he recognized that capitalism inevitably entangled our moral thoughts with our self-interest.

It wasn’t just economists who began to think differently of strangers. Artists as varied as Picasso, Joseph Conrad, and the photography-obsessed Émile Zola all made this moral inquiry of strangers the heart of their work. Yes, Adelman is probably right to say there’s no capitalist off-ramp in our post-global economy. But capitalism’s octopus-like “global mind” and its (mis)treatment of strangers should turn all economists into moral philosophers and all artists into observers of economics.