“There’s no exit in capitalism.” — Jeremy Adelman
Is that ongoing quarrel of modern politics, the battle over capitalism, just a storm in a teacup? Economic historian Jeremy Adelman thinks it might be. In The Capitalist Era, Adelman argues that all camps — left and right, Keynesian and Hayekian, socialist and libertarian — accept the unavoidability of global capitalism. There is no alternative, as Mrs Thatcher used to annoyingly say. Although Adelman, certainly no Thatcherite, isn’t celebrating the apparent inevitability of our capitalist epoch.
What interests Adelman is the making and unmaking of what he calls the “global mind.” The revolutionary quality of capitalism, he says, is that we now think of strangers as somehow part of our community. So when Adam Smith, the moral philosopher father of economics, drank his Chinese tea while reading of a deadly earthquake in China, he recognized that capitalism inevitably entangled our moral thoughts with our self-interest.
It wasn’t just economists who began to think differently of strangers. Artists as varied as Picasso, Joseph Conrad, and the photography-obsessed Émile Zola all made this moral inquiry of strangers the heart of their work. Yes, Adelman is probably right to say there’s no capitalist off-ramp in our post-global economy. But capitalism’s octopus-like “global mind” and its (mis)treatment of strangers should turn all economists into moral philosophers and all artists into observers of economics.
Five Takeaways
• The Mind, Not the Material. Against Sven Beckert’s material history (which Adelman admired and reviewed in Foreign Affairs), The Capitalist Era studies how we think about capitalism — because the thinking sets the policies, creates the attachments, fuels the wars, and builds the institutions. Capitalism, on his dating, is an eighteenth-century invention that dawns with Adam Smith’s “commercial society”: the first economic system to tie strangers across the whole planet into one interdependent web — global from the very start. Its founding text is a thought experiment: Smith’s gentleman of humanity, drinking Chinese tea while reading of a Chinese earthquake, asked whether he minds the deaths of thousands as much as the pain in his little finger. The marketplace entangles our moralities — and the question of whether sympathy can keep pace with self-interest has governed the global mind ever since.
• No Exit in Capitalism. For or against? A fair question with a layered answer: we are all heirs to the Marxist tradition — inequality and exploitation are inherent to interdependence, and “the propensity to be predatory coexists with the propensity to be empathetic.” But the trap is real: “there’s no exit in capitalism” — leaving is so punitive that every socialist revolution has paid catastrophically, a logic Adelman calls part of “the awful cunning” of the Trump administration’s economic statecraft. Keynes versus Hayek? When Andrew suggested it amounted to a family squabble — a storm in a teacup — Adelman largely agreed: both camps accept that we live inside capitalism, arguing only over how to live interdependently. No exit, though, doesn’t mean no alternatives: the argument worth recovering — lost since the globalization of the 1980s was “dumped on us” — is which form of interdependence we actually want. Gramsci’s interregnum, the time for monsters, is exactly when that argument matters.
• The Veil Between Strangers. The book’s gallery: not only philosophers but artists — Picasso, the poets, Borges (“I have a hard time writing any book without” him) — and above all photographers, because how we think about strangers is mediated through media. Smith’s verb was to see: the stranger’s invisibility was the whole problem, and photography — cheap to reproduce, claiming realism — promised to remove the veil. Zola was obsessed with it; street photography made New York and London legible as cities of vice and poverty; and the Opium War photographs that reached London in the 1860s forced a scandal, because this suffering was inflicted by our own troops. But seeing bred a new problem Smith never foresaw: indifference — too many images numbing the sympathies they were meant to awaken. In today’s supersaturation of digital and artificially generated strangers, the early doubters’ warning compounds: market interdependence plus growing indifference between the interdependent is “a recipe for calamity.”
• Earth Hunger. The charge that capitalism is eating the planet is as old as capitalism: the era of Hobson’s Imperialism named the West’s insatiable appetite to conquer and carve — “earth hunger” — after the Boer War. Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement traveled the Congo River together: Conrad turned it into Heart of Darkness; Casement wrote the first great humanitarian reports — rubber for Europe’s bicycles and tires, extermination for the Congolese and then Amazonians — before renouncing the crown, joining the Irish rebellion, and hanging for treason. Slavery runs through the same river: on Smith’s mind from the start, the plantation bonanza’s awkward foundation, with dehumanization as extraction’s precondition — a through line to the 1930s. To James Crawford’s vanishing earth (last week’s episode), Adelman offers a friendly dissent: the earth isn’t vanishing, but the accelerating metabolism of resources — extracted inhumanely for those who live there — is stressing the system. Alternatives exist; exit does not.
• Hoard the Returns, Externalize the Burdens. Adelman refuses the apocalypse chorus: end-time arguments breed cynicism — grab what you can while you can — which is precisely what turned the 1930s murderous; and the great debate the 2008 crisis should have sparked was stifled by crisis management that worked too well. “Neoliberalism” he finds overblown — the world is a mixed, messy hybrid, China neither socialist nor neoliberal — and the Thucydides Trap is a “silly metaphor”: Sparta and Athens were never as interdependent as China and the United States. Hence the closing duel: Carney versus Trump as two arguments inside the global mind about how to need strangers. Trump, the Toronto-born historian argues, is no isolationist — his is a global vision that wants to “hoard the returns and externalize the burdens,” punishing the asymmetrically dependent (Canada above all) through a predator’s bilateralism whose 1930s pedigree Adelman names with discomfort. And China? Sitting on the sidelines, courting Canada, playing “an old game” of constructing and dividing markets — as old as the global mind itself.
About the Guest
Jeremy Adelman is the Henry Charles Lea Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and professor of history and director of the Global History Lab at the University of Cambridge. Born in Toronto and educated at Toronto, the LSE, and Oxford, he has lived and worked in seven countries. His many books include Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman and Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. The Capitalist Era: The Making—and Unmaking—of ...
