Keith Hart
During a period around 1900, five books came out, each of them offering a radically new perspective on the modern economic system that was then given a name, “capitalism.” They were V. I. Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which is still the best available account of capitalist development in backward areas; Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which launched the study of consumption and institutional economics; Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900), which has a claim to being the most profound meditation on the topic since Karl Marx; Werner Sombart’s Der Moderner Kapitalismus (1902), which is the original source for the name of our economic system; and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), which is possibly the most famous essay in sociology ever written.
All of these were in some kind of dialogue with Karl Marx’s work that was published in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also a time when the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, and cubism were being formed. Not much later the Federal Reserve and the first fully-automated production line saw daylight in 1913, and twentieth-century capitalism was born.
Noam Yuran’s book is likewise in dialogue with Marx, and it draws heavily on Veblen and Weber, but only indirectly or not at all on the others. We are living through a watershed in world economic history when the doctrines of orthodox economics have been discredited by financial crisis. It ought to be a time of intellectual renewal and discovery, but the contours of such change are not yet obvious. By revisiting that epoch just over a century ago and, especially, through his interpretation of Marx’s theory and method, Yuran may well have produced a classic of our era. His argument is by no means solely an exercise in intellectual archaeology, nor is it an explanation . . .