Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AIJohn Cassidy2025

At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company to Apple. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From the Haitian rebels who overthrew French colonial capitalism and the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation, to the Latin American dependistas , the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names?Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polyani?but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Ghandian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War; and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founding father of degrowth.

Titre original : Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI (2025)