PRESTOPUNDIT -- A Good Blog at a Great Price. Guaranteed.

Jerry Muller's The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought has been reviewed in Foreign Affairs by Sheri Berman. Snippet:

Muller has written a lively and accessible survey of what dozens of major European thinkers have thought about capitalism. The value of the book lies less in its contribution to the literature on any particular individual than in its gathering together in one place of a wealth of information on figures from Burke, Smith, and Voltaire to Schumpeter, Keynes, and Hayek. Muller's masterful sketches of intellectuals from across the political spectrum help put today's battles over globalization in proper historical perspective. He reminds us just how venerable many of the current antiglobalization movement's concerns actually are, and thus how they need to be understood and addressed not as the consequences of recent policies or conditions but rather as inherent in the dynamics of capitalism itself. What becomes painfully clear in the process is how far the level of debate has fallen in recent decades and how impoverished and narrow contemporary thought about the market has become ...

Hegel believed that in order to lead a truly full and satisfying life, individuals needed a sense of identity, a feeling of being connected to some larger whole beyond themselves. In the precapitalist world these connections were provided by things such as religion, tradition, and shared cultural norms, but in modern society Hegel thought they would have to come from institutions such as the state and the civil service.
Indeed, perhaps the only defender of capitalism whom Muller finds largely unmoved by the critiques is the twentieth-century Austrian liberal Friedrich Hayek (which undoubtedly explains a large part of his contemporary appeal). Hayek had little sympathy for talk of virtue or "higher ends" and was skeptical of any state role in controlling the market or in fostering so-called public goods. Instead, he praised precisely what was often criticized, the emergence of a society in which individuals were as free as possible to do as they pleased and states served merely as "pieces of utilitarian machinery intended to help individuals in the fullest development of their individual personality." But Hayek is the exception that proves the rule, for he was honest enough to recognize that the libertarianism he championed would not necessarily be very popular because it would be too personally and socially destabilizing for many to handle. Rather than try to alleviate such concerns, however, he was content to suppress them and accept limitations on democracy in the process -- an aspect of his thinking that receives little attention from his admirers today.