------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW -------------- 
Published by EH.NET (April 2005) 
 
Jerry Z. Muller, _The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western  
Thought_. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. xvii + 487 pp. $16.95  
(paperback), ISBN: 0-385-72166-8. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Bruce Caldwell, Department of Economics,  
University of North Carolina - Greensboro. 
 
 
It is, sadly, a truism that people who are not economists often have  
a hard time making sense of what economists say. We are caricatured,  
often not without reason, as a profession mired in numbers and  
mathematical models, with an impenetrable jargon and way of reasoning  
all our own. Many non-economists are, as a result, often suspicious  
of our views. This is frustrating to economists, especially to those  
who feel that they have something important to say, which is, of  
course, all of us. 
 
Sometimes, though, non-economists do not understand us because they  
ask questions or raise concerns that seldom occur to us. My  
university Honors Program has a regular coffee at which different  
topics are discussed each week. One time I led a discussion on the  
topic of "money." I learned from that experience that there are a  
large number of ways to talk about money besides its functions as a  
unit of account, a facilitator of trade, and a store of value. 
 
As Jerry Muller shows in his brilliant book _The Mind and the  
Market_, there are also a large number of ways to talk about the  
market system. Muller reviews what a number of modern (modern meaning  
from about 1700 through the twentieth century) Western thinkers have  
said about markets and capitalism. He includes figures that  
economists might expect: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter,  
John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek. But he also includes many that  
most historians of economic thought would not think to include, among  
them Voltaire, Hegel, Justus M=F6ser, Edmund Burke, Max Weber, Georg  
Simmel, Werner Sombart, Georg Luk=E1s, Hans Freyer, and Herbert  
Marcuse. Muller gives a full chapter to some of the thinkers, while  
for others he links two or three together. As one moves from chapter  
to chapter, the old tried and true dichotomies (left versus right the  
first among them; many of the most trenchant critics of markets were  
conservatives) pretty quickly fall away. Instead the effects of  
markets on moral and cultural values, on such non-market institutions  
as the family, the nation, the church, and other associative groups,  
on senses of community and individuality, are the focus. 
 
Given the space limitations of a review, I will mention only a few  
whose ideas on capitalism and its institutions are likely to be  
unfamiliar to economists. The French philosophe Voltaire (1694-1778),  
propagandist for the Enlightenment and one of the first "public  
intellectuals," praised the pursuit of self-interest, this because he  
found it less dangerous than the pursuit of religious uniformity:  
commerce, after all, brought together Catholic and Protestant, Muslim  
and Jew, and made their peaceful co-existence profitable. A  
counterbalance to Voltaire can be found in the writings of the German  
conservative Justin M=F6ser (1720-94), who saw the changes being  
wrought by both capitalism and cameralism as destroying the variety  
of institutions and folkways that gave the many German principalities  
of his day their vitality and identity. M=F6ser lamented the passing of  
guilded master artisans and their replacement by wage labor and the  
culture of the shopkeeper, who by importing goods from abroad wrecked  
havoc on local markets. The Victorian poet and inspector of schools  
Matthew Arnold (1822-88) didn't so much dislike markets as he did the  
importation of market values into areas where they did not belong.  
His critique of "philistinism" doubtless underlies the smirk that so  
many economists encounter when they talk to humanist members of the  
academy about restructuring institutions so that all incentives are  
aligned. Max Weber (1864-1920) and Georg Simmel (1858-1918) both  
emphasized how the emergence of capitalism affected how people think,  
making the rational calculation of means and ends more ubiquitous.  
Though the gains in efficiency from such a change of mind set are  
evident, the danger for Simmel was that the pursuit of means would  
cause us to lose sight as to which ends were most important, that, in  
a phrase, the means would become the ends. His idea that too much  
choice can be a curse should make sense to almost everyone, with the  
possible exception of a choice theorist. 
 
Muller's book has multiple virtues. First, though this is principally  
a contribution to intellectual history, Muller seamlessly adds to it  
illuminating background information drawn especially from economic,  
but also from political, social and cultural history. Next, he has an  
excellent eye for the telling detail or anecdote. Have you ever  
wondered exactly who Burke was talking about when he said that the  
"age of chivalry is over. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and  
calculators has succeeded ..."? Muller tells you, on pages 132-33. (I  
won't give away the specific references, but Burke's general point  
was that though commerce could be a civilizing agent, this depended  
on the presence of institutions and behaviors that developed  
separately from markets, a theme to which Hayek, among others, would  
return.) A third strength is that even when Muller writes about  
people familiar to economists, he does so in a fresh and insightful  
way. (For me, his interpretation of Schumpeter as an ironic writer  
was wholly new, plausible, and helped clear up certain apparent  
paradoxes in Schumpeter's writings.) Finally, the book is that rarest  
of achievements, a scholarly contribution that is also well-written.  
Muller's engaging style extends even to his encyclopedic footnotes,  
which occasionally rival those of A.J.P. Taylor for the rapier touch.  
(E.g., his sardonic comment on page 435, note 2, that one  
three-volume work on Marx "entombs a large body of facts in a  
Communist conceptual sarcophagus.") Though the book is enjoyable to  
read, it is not always fun: the despicable treatment of the Jews by  
European intellectuals of every stripe is, sadly, a frequent theme.  
Because it is packed with information it is not a quick read, either,  
but taken leisurely it is consistently pleasurable. 
 
_The Mind and the Market_ would serve as a useful supplement to a  
course in the history of economic thought, or it could be a text in  
an interdisciplinary course on the assessment of capitalism in its  
cultural context. But even if you do not use it in a course, it is  
well worth reading. Something to note in conclusion: the subtitle for  
the hardback, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2002, was  
_Capitalism in Modern European Thought_. The Anchor paperback changes  
this to _Capitalism in Western Thought_ on its cover, but  
incongruously the change was not made on the title page inside the  
book. 
 
 
Bruce Caldwell is an historian of economic thought at the University  
of North Carolina - Greensboro. He is the General Editor of _The  
Collected Works of F.A. Hayek_ and the author of _Hayek's Challenge_,  
published in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press. 
 
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