We’ll have to wait a while for Commentary to post John Steele Gordon‘s full review of the new book, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism. But his first three paragraphs are worth quoting in full:
In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes described the life of mankind before the development of civilization as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” But even in Hobbes’ day, that was an accurate description of life for the vast majority of the people in the world. Eighty percent of the population lived at a subsistence level. Famine, plague, filth, and grinding, unending toil were their lot.
Today, however, a mere 359 years after Hobbes published his immortal phrase in his masterpiece, Leviathan, the average person in the developed countries (a category quickly growing in number) lives at a level of luxury and ease that would have been utterly unimaginable to Thomas Hobbes. Sheer physical labor has nearly disappeared as a means of earning a living (except for professional athletes earning millions a year), while myriad machines function as servants for the average citizen. What happened to alter so profoundly an economic system that had been in place since the dawn of agriculture more than 12,000 years ago?
The answer, in a word, is capitalism. An economy that had been marked by control from the top and by a deep fear of change morphed, in Hobbes’ native England over the course of a single century, into an economic system based on individual initiative that sought to maximize profit and that welcomed change.
And capitalism is not done working its magic, if you believe Steve Forbes‘ latest book, How Capitalism Will Save Us:
