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Where Art Thou, Adam Smith?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 March 2013

Tom Hoffman
Tom Hoffman*
Affiliation:
Spring Hill College
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Extract

The early years of the twenty-first century have not been good for global capitalism. An international credit crisis and a widespread recession, with all of their attendant anxieties and miseries, have unsurprisingly shaken public support for free-market processes—especially within many of capitalism's traditional strongholds. As a colorful token of this lost faith, The Socialist Economic Bulletin, published by London's leftist former mayor Ken Livingstone, reported in 2010 a “tenfold increase” in sales of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in Germany from the year prior. Meanwhile, from the other end of the ideological spectrum, in 2011 The Economist reported that public support for free-market economics actually fared relatively well in Marx's native Germany, where it drew the highest level of support among the 25 national populations surveyed (just edging out nominally communist China). Indeed, support in both Germany and China was strong compared to capitalism's depressed standing in the United States. The percentage of American respondents willing to give at least qualified assent (i.e., to choose “somewhat agree” or better) to the claim that it is the “best” economic system fell from a leading 80% early in the millennium to just 59% by 2010.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 193 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2013 

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