In roughly the last two decades or so, there has developed among historians a body of research known as the “New History of Capitalism,” an often-critical look at race, gender and the power dynamics in capitalism. Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantments of Mammon joins too many contributions to this literature in being defiantly uninterested in anything economists and economic historians have written that might show the benefits of markets. Granted, these books sometimes discuss economists and their work, but not as scholars and ideas to be evaluated on the merits of their logical consistency or empirical accuracy but as demons to be defeated and dogmas to be denounced.

Big promises / I will highlight the good, the bad, and the ugly in The Enchantments of Mammon. First, the good: as befits an 800-page work of history that took the author some two decades to write, it is filled with useful and interesting facts, fascinating characters, and intriguing references. In reading it I found my own list of things to read growing and growing—enough, I think, to keep me occupied for the next 20 years if I set my mind to it. McCarraher sketches out his thesis in the context of a detailed history of business literature and personalities who argue—as Deirdre McCloskey and I do in our own forthcoming book—that there is nothing necessarily wrong with buying, selling, and innovating.

McCarraher also explores and explains the ideas of Romantic critics of capitalism like Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin, who “turned to precapitalist values and cultures for inspiration.” He does not gloss over Carlyle and Ruskin’s racist views, noting that Carlyle’s denunciation of economics as “the dismal science” was part of his defense of slavery, and he is admirably frank about how “this book partakes unashamedly of [Ruskin’s] sacramental Romanticism.” Readers will learn a lot about how the capitalist world looks through the transcendent frame of Romanticism.

The book begins promisingly enough. McCarraher writes, “Far from being an agent of ‘disenchantment,’ capitalism, I contend, has been a regime of enchantment, a repression, displacement, and renaming of our intrinsic and inveterate longing for divinity.” He promises “an extended assay of the moral and metaphysical imagination: our ideals of self and the common good that emerge from the way we understand the nature of the cosmos—what philosophers and theologians would call our metaphysics, ontology, or cosmology.” This suggests an emphasis on the kind of questions economists are (in)famous for ignoring.

Communicating contempt / The good, I fear, pales in comparison to the bad and the ugly. It is clear that even though the publishers sent me a gratis copy, economists by and large are not invited to the conversation—as participants, at any rate. This would be fine if the book were a treatise on military history or some other topic on which economists might not have much to say. But it is subtitled How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, so the book might want to engage with and really understand the ideas of the economists who figure so prominently as villains in McCarraher’s story.

Alas, that isn’t to be. Perhaps it is buried in footnotes that I missed and that don’t come up in a Google Books search, but I could find no engagement with McCloskey’s “bourgeois era” trilogy, which is a remarkable omission given that McCarraher wrote an angry 7,000-word review of the first volume in the series, The Bourgeois Virtues, after it was published. McCloskey replied to his review and tells me he never replied to her. He certainly doesn’t do so now. The Enchantments of Mammon contains no hint of McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity (2010) or Bourgeois Equality (2016), which directly address his project. I think he would have benefited from doing so, particularly the chapters critiquing the late Austro-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi, whom McCarraher cites approvingly near the beginning of the book.

McCarraher doesn’t just overlook McCloskey. In a book that features Carlyle and Ruskin so prominently, David Levy’s excellent How the Dismal Science Got Its Name is nowhere to be found. Theologically minded economists are a rare breed, though not perhaps as rare as one might think, and it speaks volumes about the state of the academy that in writing an 800-page book over two decades McCarraher ignores A.M.C. Waterman, Paul Heyne, and Laurence Iannacone. Especially conspicuous for his absence is Robert H. Nelson; surely books with titles like Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics and Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond would have merited at least some attention in a book subtitled How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity. (See “An Intellectual Odyssey Cut Short,” Summer 2019.)

Or not. Most of what McCarraher has to say about economists and economics—not to economists, but about economists and economics—is woven into page after page of sneering, indignant invective that, after almost 700 pages of text, is simply exhausting. We read, for example, about “the avaricious and punitive sophistry professed in the dismal pseudoscience” of economics, which “is not just a dismal but a fundamentally fraudulent science.” A few hundred pages later, we read this about Ayn Rand:

Though written at the meridian of the New Deal era, Rand’s hateful and sanctimonious fables of selfishness supplied an intoxicating fillip for later captains of neoliberal depredation. Emboldening the piracies of finance capital, feeding the cyberculture’s exhilarant ambitions of technological sublimity, and bracing a new plutocracy with a conviction of its own existential superiority, her kitschy and melodramatic tributes to greed augured an epoch of spectacular pillage.

The book is strewn with similar passages that would elicit “Amens” from the progressive choir but communicate little more than the author’s contempt for capitalism and its defenders.

Conclusion / I think McCarraher’s unfortunate treatment of Ludwig von Mises summarizes the entire book in both content and method. Mises’s essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” later expanded into the book Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, is dismissed as a “diatribe.” McCarraher refers readers to Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death “for a brilliant critique of Mises,” but what Brown offers is a simple wish for “socialism, as a system which by its very nature transcends the psychology of Homo economicus.”

Throughout the book, McCarraher seems to yearn (like Brown, apparently) for a truly radical reorganizing of society according to the Romantic transcendent frame, a reorganizing in which principles like “resources have alternative uses” and “people respond to incentives” no longer apply. It reminds me of Ernst Mandel’s introduction to an edition of the first volume of Marx’s Capital in which he says that, after the revolution, human nature will change and the rules of bourgeois economics will no longer apply. It also reminds me of how Mises closes his book Epistemological Problems of Economics, and I think it is an appropriate response to The Enchantments of Mammon:

Most men endure the sacrifice of the intellect more easily than the sacrifice of their daydreams. They cannot bear that their utopias should run aground on the unalterable necessities of human existence. What they yearn for is another reality different from the one given in this world. They long for the “leap of humanity out of the realm of necessity and into the realm of freedom.” They wish to be free of a universe of whose order they do not approve.

In the end, I think that’s what The Enchantments of Mammon is: a “yearn(ing) for another reality from the one given in this world.” Of our universe and its order, McCarraher screams loudly and clearly from every page, “I do not approve.”