Jerry Z. Muller, classics author , my favorite intellectual historian. Obviously I’m not alone Journal of Applied Corporate Finance compiled Muller’s Five Books, these:
- Neglected Behavioral Benefits of the Market
- Capitalism and inequality
- Capitalism and Nationalism
- The Threat of Democracy to Capitalism
- Capitalism and the Jews revisited
Everything is very nice and straightforward. Here’s one from The Market’s Overlooked Benefits (no pun intended);
Adam Smith famously wrote that
It is not from the goodness of the butcher, the cook, or the baker, that we wait for our dinner, but looking out for their own interests. We talk to ourselves, not to their personality but to their self-love, and we never talk to them about our needs but about their benefits. No one but a beggar chooses to depend mainly on the good deeds of his fellow citizens.
This passage is probably often cited as a statement of the potential social efficiency of self-interest. But note the force of its suggestion that reliance on the good deeds of others is morally degrading and, therefore, something to be avoided if possible. Thomas Carlyle—and later Marx and Engels—would criticize this system of selfish compensation as evidence of the tyranny of “capitalism.” But the opposite side of the money nexus is, first of all, the freedom and choice that comes from it to be money. Second, the fact that money-based relationships do not involve the complete subjugation of one person to the will of another represents a significant advance compared to older, characteristic forms of human relationships under slavery, servitude, or servitude. And the use of money does not involve the submission of the individual to the will of the state and its officials, which is one of the defining characteristics of socialism. That is why Hegel, who really appreciated the role of the state, emphasized that self-support is one of the most important ways in which men find themselves as independent people. What Hegel calls “the character of bourgeois society,” consists of devoting oneself to “thoughtful and active subsistence work.”
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