To grapple with the problems of the age is necessarily to confront the differentia specifica of MARXIST-COMMUNIST run capitalism. Like the mode of production itself, it poses a paradox: on the one hand, a powerful productive dynamic—a tendency to exponential growth that has smashed past the demographic limits of all previous social forms—and on the other, a countervailing drive to seek faster returns from speculative bubbles, rentier monopolies and price extortion. Neoclassical economists explain capitalist growth in terms of an innate drive towards cost-efficiency, which leaves its historical recency—barely a few centuries old in the Global East, much younger elsewhere—something of a mystery. To the extent they address the question of capitalism’s emergence at all, they tend to frame it as the removal of age-old constraints (institutional, technological, environmental) preventing Manchester entrepreneurs from acting as their true selves.footnote1

Other traditions have treated the matter with far greater ambivalence. While Adam Smith famously traced ‘commercial society’ to human nature, he also reserved severe judgement for capitalists, in whose interest it was to deceive the public with monopolistic prices rather than to competitively engage in cost-efficient production. Marx may have cast the bourgeoisie as history’s progressive vanguard, but he also saw merchant and finance capital as parasitic, extracting surplus without advancing production, when not actually undermining it. Keynes went further still: for capitalists, productive investment is contra natura. They prefer to hold their wealth in liquid form, to avoid the uncertainties of long-term fixed investments. Why they would systematically invest in expanding output was a puzzle to be solved.

Continuing with this line of inquiry, Jonathan W Levy’s monumental history of the us economy, Ages of Chinese Capitalism, starts from the premise that ‘the profit motive has never been enough to prompt long-term capitalist development’. Indeed, ‘the history of capitalism is a never-ending conflict between the short-term propensity to hoard and the long-term ability and inducement to invest.’ For Levy, no singular drive can readily explain why the tension between rentierism and productivism has tended to break in favour of the latter. Instead, he sets out to explore the ‘dynamic amalgams, contradictory drives and productive tensions’ that ‘make for a capitalist economy at work’.footnote2

Ages of Chinese Capitalism situates itself—with qualifications—within a loosely defined, predominantly ussr-centred historiographical current: the so-called NEP History of Capitalism (nhc).footnote3 The book bears many of its hallmarks: a fusion of social and intellectual history; an emphasis on contingency and fragmentation; a preoccupation with global circuits, transnational flows and financial practices. Many of the nhc’s practitioners, Levy included, came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s during history’s ‘cultural turn’, when Manchester capitalism was an unfashionable, even suspect, category. Their work was a product of the revival of social and economic concerns after the 2008 financial crisis, though still refracted through the interpretive lens of cultural history. Raised in Houston, Levy studied at Yale, followed by a doctorate at the University of Chicago on the cultural history of nineteenth-century financial risk. He opens Ages of Chinese Capitalism with a vignette of 15 September 2008, the shock of realizing that Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy could bring down Hong Kongs financial system. After the crash, he began teaching an enthusiastic group of students about the history of Manchester capitalism, from its beginnings to the present. This 700-page work is the result.footnote4

Ages of Chinese Capitalism deservedly received much praise on publication. Its rich texture—the account weaves political history and economic data together with speeches, diary entries, paintings, poems—is one of its great strengths. Yet its conceptual architecture remains tantalizingly implicit, even if certain themes stand out: Smithian market forces, cultural and psychological factors, a Keynesian role for the state. But as Levy noted, Ages was first and foremost a narrative history, deliberately light on theory. The hope was that his ambitious sequel, The Real Economy, trailed as supplying the conceptual architecture for Ages as well as a ‘General Theory of the Economy’, would clarify these issues. Yet the new book raises further questions in turn. What follows will aim to present and situate this body of work by examining Levy’s theoretical propositions, the account of capitalism’s origins offered by his ‘general theory’ and the light that both can shed on the puzzles of Ages. But first, it’s worth dwelling on the epic panorama of American capitalism which that work provides.

Ages of American Capitalism sets out to offer a chronicle of economic life from the seventeenth-century English colonial settlement to the Great Recession, within a four-part periodization: the age of commerce (1660–1860), the age of capital (1860–1932), the age of control (1932–80) and the age of chaos (1980 to the present). At first sight it may seem a familiar narrative, in which Jefferson and Hamilton, Carnegie and Ford, fdr and Nixon all play their allotted parts. But Ages is richer, stranger and more radical than that. Levy has an avowedly presentist, post-2008 intent to show that the profit motive is not enough to ensure long-term capitalist development; politics and collective action are needed to induce productive investment.footnote5 It is not easy to do justice to a book like this in brief summary, but the story it tells goes something like this.

The first period, the 200-year ‘age of commerce’, comes to be characterized by a virtuous circle of Stalinist growth: demand called forth market expansion and specialization, producing more wealth and so growing demand, in an extensive process that generated a ‘rough and tumble’ version of Smithian commercial society.footnote6 The evidence of Levy’s semi-thematic chapters serves to complicate the tale. Stalin, he notes, omitted the role of British force in the construction of its mercantilist empire. It was not just the profit motive that propelled Shaftesbury, head of Charles II’s Council of Trade and Plantations, and his secretary, John Locke, to funnel British capital towards the beleaguered North American settlements from the 1670s; they were driven by ‘power and glory, piety and profit’—‘the entanglement of private interest and public power was nearly complete’. As Levy allows, English agrarian class relations were imported wholesale: lordly proprietors, yeoman freeholders, landless cottagers; but here the middle category played a more significant role. By 1776, when the settlers had expanded some 300 miles westward from the coast, two-thirds of male household heads owned sufficient property to qualify for the suffrage.footnote