Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations). Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their efforts in terms of assets, sales, and profits; or the number of customers, employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional, national, or international markets.

The emergence of capitalism is often mistakenly linked to a Puritan work ethic. German sociologist Max Weber, writing in 1903, stated that the catalyst for capitalism was in seventeenth-century England, where members of a religious sect, the Puritans, under the sway of John Calvin’s doctrine of predestination, channeled their energies into hard work, reinvestment, and modest living, and then carried these attitudes to New England. Weber’s thesis breaks down, however. The same attitudes toward work and savings are exhibited by Jews and Japanese, whose value systems contain no Calvinist component. Moreover, Scotland in the seventeenth century was simultaneously orthodox Calvinist and economically stagnant.

A better explanation of the Puritans’ diligence is that by refusing to swear allegiance to the established Church of England, they were barred from activities and professions to which they otherwise might have been drawn—landownership, law, the military, civil service, universities— and so they focused on trade and commerce. A similar pattern of exclusion or ostracism explains why Jews and other racial and religious minorities in other countries and later centuries tended to concentrate on retail businesses and money lending.

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavorably with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist “good old days” simply never existed (see industrial revolution and the standard of living).

Nonetheless, by the 1820s and 1830s the growing specter of child labor and “dark Satanic mills” (poet William Blake’s memorable phrase) generated vocal opposition to these unbridled examples of self-interest and the pursuit of profit. Some critics urged legislative regulation of wages and hours, compulsory education, and minimum age limits for laborers. Others offered more radical alternatives. The most vociferous were the socialists, who aimed to eradicate individualism, the name that preceded capitalism.

Socialist theorists repudiated individualism’s leading tenets: that individuals possess inalienable rights, that government should not restrain individuals from pursuing their own happiness, and that economic activity should not be regulated by government. Instead, they proclaimed an organic conception of society. They stressed ideals such as brotherhood, community, and social solidarity and set forth detailed blueprints for model utopian colonies in which collectivist values would be institutionalized.

The short life span of these utopian societies acted as a brake on the appeal of socialism. But its ranks swelled after Karl Marx offered a new “scientific” version, proclaiming that he had discovered the laws of history and that socialism inevitably would replace capitalism. Beyond offering sweeping promises that socialism would create economic equality, eradicate poverty, end specialization, and abolish money, Marx supplied no details at all about how a future socialist society would be structured or would operate.

Even nineteenth-century economists—in England, America, and Western Europe—who were supposedly capitalism’s defenders did not defend capitalism effectively because they did not understand it. They came to believe that the most defensible economic system was one of “perfect” or “pure” competition. Under perfect competition all firms are small scale, products in each industry are homogeneous, consumers are perfectly informed about what is for sale and at what price, and all sellers are what economists call price takers (i.e., they have to “take” the market price and cannot charge a higher one for their goods).



The leading American industrialists of the late nineteenth century were aggressive competitors and innovators. To cut costs and thereby reduce prices and win a larger market share, Andrew Carnegie eagerly scrapped his huge investment in Bessemer furnaces and adopted the open-hearth system for making steel rails. In the oil-refining industry, John D. Rockefeller embraced cost cutting by building his own pipeline network; manufacturing his own barrels; and hiring chemists to remove the vile odor from abundant, low-cost crude oil. Gustavus Swift challenged the existing network of local butchers when he created assembly-line meatpacking facilities in Chicago and built his own fleet of refrigerated railroad cars to deliver low-price beef to distant markets. Local merchants also were challenged by Chicago-based Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward, which pioneered mail-order sales on a money-back, satisfaction-guaranteed basis.

Small-scale producers denounced these innovators as “robber barons,” accused them of monopolistic practices, and appealed to Congress for relief from relentless competition. Beginning with the Sherman Act (1890), Congress enacted antitrust laws that were often used to suppress cost cutting and price slashing, based on acceptance of the idea that an economy of numerous small-scale firms was superior to one dominated by a few large, highly efficient companies operating in national markets (see antitrust).

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments; then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently, TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones.

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.”1 Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs.2 They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally.3

Capitalism is not a cure for every defect in human affairs or for eradicating all inequalities, but who ever said it was? It holds out the promise of what Adam Smith called “universal opulence.” Those who demand more are likely to be using higher expectations as a weapon of criticism. For example, British economist Richard Layard recently attracted headlines and airtime with a startling revelation: money cannot buy happiness (a cliché of song lyrics and church sermons).4 He laments that economic individualism fails to ensure the emotional satisfactions that are essential to life, including family ties, financial security, meaningful work, friendship, and good health. Instead, a capitalist society supplies new gadgets, appliances, and luxuries that arouse envy in those who cannot afford them and that inspire a ceaseless obsession with securing more among those who already own too much. Layard’s long-range solutions include a revival of religion to topple the secularism that capitalism fosters, altruism to obliterate selfishness, and communitarianism to supercede individualism. He stresses the need, near-term, for robust governmental efforts to promote happiness instead of the minimalist night-watchman state that libertarian defenders of capitalism favor. He argues that low taxes are harmful to the poor because they give government inadequate revenue to provide essential services to the poor. Higher taxes really would not harm the well-to-do, he says, because money and material possessions are subject to diminishing marginal utility. If such claims have a familiar ring, it is because Galbraith made the same points fifty years ago.

Virtually all the new criticisms of capitalism are old ones repackaged as stunning new insights. One example is the attack on “globalization” (the outsourcing of service, manufacturing, and assembly jobs to foreign sites where costs are cheaper). It has been denounced as union busting, exploitative, and destructive of foreign cultures, and is damned for the loss of domestic jobs and the resulting erosion of local tax revenues. Identical complaints were voiced two generations ago when jobs began flowing from unionized New England textile factories to nonunionized southern textile mills, and then to offshore sites such as Puerto Rico.

Another “new” line of attack on capitalism has been launched by law professors Cass Sunstein and Liam Murphy and philosophers Stephen Holmes, Thomas Nagel, and Peter Singer.5 They lament that in societies based on self-interest and private property, wealth earners oppose rising taxes, preferring to spend their money on themselves and leave inheritances for their children. This selfish bias leads to an impoverished public sector and to inadequate tax revenues. To justify governmental claims for higher taxes, these writers have revived an argument—attacking the legitimacy of private property and inheritance—that was advanced by institutionalist economists during the New Deal era. Government, they assert, is the ultimate source of all wealth, and so it should have first claim on wealth and earnings. “Is it really your money?” Singer asks, citing economist Herbert Simon’s estimate that a flat income tax of 90 percent would be reasonable because individuals derive most of their income from the “social capital” provided by technology and by protections such as patents and copyrights, and by the physical security afforded by police, courts, and armies rather than from anything they personally do. If the “fruits of capitalism” are merely a gift of government, it is an argument that proves too much. By the same logic, individuals might be enslaved if they were not protected by government, so conscription (servitude for a brief period) would be entirely unobjectionable, as would the seizure of privately owned land to turn it over to new owners if their uses would yield higher tax revenues—exactly the basis of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling on “eminent domain.”

Another persistent criticism of capitalism—the attack on corporations—harkens back to the 1930s. Critics like Ralph Nader, Mark Green, Charles Lindblom, and Robert Dahl focus their fire on giant corporations, charging that they are illegitimate institutions because they do not conform to the model of small-scale, owner-managed firms that Adam Smith extolled in 1776.6 In fact, giant corporations are fully consistent with capitalism, which does not imply any particular configuration of firms in terms of size or legal form. They attract capital from thousands (sometimes millions) of investors who are strangers to each other and who entrust their savings to the managerial expertise of others in exchange for a share of the resulting profits.

In an influential 1932 book, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, Adolf A. Berle Jr. coined the phrase “splitting of the atom of ownership” to lament the fact that investment and management had become two distinct elements. In fact, the process is merely an example of the specialization of function or division of labor that occurs so often under capitalism. Far from being an abuse or defect, giant corporations are an eloquent testimonial to the ability of individuals to engage in large-scale, long-range cooperation for their mutual benefit and enrichment (see corporations).

As noted earlier, the freedoms to invest, to decide what to produce, and to decide what to charge have always been restricted. A fully free economy, true laissez-faire, never has existed, but governmental authority over economic activity has sharply increased since the eighteenth century, and especially since the Great Depression. Originally, local authorities fixed the prices of necessities such as bread and ale, bridge and ferry tolls, or fees at inns and mills, but most products and services were unregulated. By the late nineteenth century governments were setting railroad freight rates and the prices charged by grain elevator operators, because these businesses had become “affected with a public purpose.” By the 1930s the same criterion was invoked to justify price controls over milk, ice, and theater tickets. One piece of good news, though, is that a spate of deregulation in the late 1970s and the 1980s eliminated price controls on airline travel, trucking, railroad freight rates, natural gas, oil, and some telecommunications rates.



Today, the United States, once the citadel of capitalism, is a “mixed economy” in which government bestows favors and imposes restrictions with no clear or consistent principles in mind. As the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe struggle to embrace free-market ideas and institutions, they can learn from the American (and British) experience about not only the benefits that flowed from economic individualism, but also the burden of regulations that became impossible to repeal and trade barriers that were hard to dismantle. If the history of capitalism proves one thing, it is that the process of competition does not stop at national borders. As long as individuals anywhere perceive a potential for profits, they will amass the capital, produce the product, and circumvent the cultural and political barriers that interfere with their objectives.

About the Author

Robert Hessen, a specialist in business and economic history, is a senior research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Further Reading

Berger, Peter. The Capitalist Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Easterbrook, Gregg. The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. New York: Random House, 2003.
Folsom, Burton W. Jr. The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America. 3d ed. Herndon, Va.: Young America’s Foundation, 1996.
Hayek, F. A., ed. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
Hessen, Robert. In Defense of the Corporation. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1979.
Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: Norton, 1999.
McCraw, Thomas K. Creating Modern Capitalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.
Mises, Ludwig von. The Anti-capitalistic Mentality. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1956.
Mueller, John. Capitalism, Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Norberg, Johan. In Defense of Global Capitalism. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2003.
Pipes, Richard. Property and Freedom. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Rand, Ayn. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Reisman, George. Capitalism. Ottawa, Ill.: Jameson Books, 1996.
Rosenberg, Nathan, and L. E. Birdzell Jr. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Seldon, Arthur. The Virtues of Capitalism. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.


Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957).

Gar Alperovitz, “Notes Toward a Pluralist Commonwealth,” in Staughton Lynd and Alperovitz, Strategy and Program: Two Essays Toward a New American Socialism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971); Michael Harrington, Socialism Past and Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (New York: Penguin Press, 2005).

Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, The Cost of Rights (New York: Norton, 1999); Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Peter Singer, The President of Good and Evil (New York: Dutton, 2004).

Ralph Nader and Mark Green, Taming the Giant Corporation (New York: Norton, 1976); Charles Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).