A protest against the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 18. | AFP
Journalist and author John Cassidy offers a historical compass to contemporary debates.
Feb 06, 2026
John Cassidy senses something significant about current-day debates about capitalism. In the past decade, capitalism has experienced a profound crisis of legitimacy, “one that extended to the right as well as the left”. Both left-wing socialists and right-wing nationalists have excoriated neoliberalism and globalisation. Others have gone further, predicting the very end of capitalism.
This should prompt an important question: have we been here before?
Cassidy, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is the author of Capitalism and Its Critics: A Battle of Ideas in the Modern World. His book offers a welcome historical compass to contemporary debates and a succinct answer to the question stated above.
Yes, thinkers across the political spectrum have attacked capitalism in the past, and many of them have prognosticated about capitalism’s collapse. But Cassidy offers words of caution. “Any prediction of capitalism’s demise needs to take account of its powers of rejuvenation,” he writes.
In this episode of Past Imperfect, Cassidy uses the present moment to frame a longer history of economic ideas. Capitalism and Its Critics profiles over 30 economic thinkers from across three centuries. This includes well-known figures like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, and John Maynard Keynes.
But the real outstanding feature of this book is how it shines light on a number of women and non-Westerners who deserve their dues. During this episode, we discuss figures like Flora Tristan, a 19th-century Frenchwoman appalled by the legacy of colonialism in South America, and JC Kumarappa, the Gandhian economist who is strangely forgotten in his own country.
While Cassidy’s book touches on a dizzying range of economic ideas, we concentrate on two overarching themes in this episode: the legacy of empire and the role of the state.
It is certainly significant that the first thinker Cassidy profiles is Wiliam Bolts, who, in 1772, published a damning book on the East India Company. Bolts, a slippery character who worked for the Company in Bengal, was motivated by personal grievances against the corporation which was quickly gobbling up territory in the subcontinent.
Nevertheless, his work helped touch off a furious debate in the late 18th century about crony capitalism, the unbridled power of corporations, and overseas military adventures. If such debates sound strangely familiar, it is because many of the key critiques of capitalism – its exploitative nature, its concentration of wealth, and how it contorts politics to suit business interests – have remained remarkably consistent over the last three centuries.
Empire – and, in particular, Britain’s conquest of India – inspired some of the most full-throated denunciations of capitalism. Marx staked out a sometimes-ambiguous position on the effects of British rule in India, but Luxemburg was sharply condemnatory. Even Tristan, traveling to Britain in 1839, remarked that the burgeoning size of London “simultaneously calls to mind the commercial supremacy of England and her oppression of India!”
Empire, almost inevitably, led many thinkers to consider the role of the state. Thorstein Veblen, the heterodox Norwegian-American economist who once wrote an essay titled “The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress”, presciently observed how the business class helped prompt the American state to acquire an overseas empire in the late-19th century. The British thinker John Hobson wrote the seminal thesis on how empire was the product of distinct collusion between big business and the government; nevertheless, he looked to the state for solutions, such as policies aimed at the redistribution of wealth.
Something significant happened in the mid-20th century. Largely, but certainly not exclusively, from the influence of Keynes’s ideas, governments around the world began taking on extraordinarily new functions to manage capitalism and remedy social inequality.
Cassidy is careful to note the thinkers who saw a fatal flaw in Keynesianism: that capitalist interests could undermine redistributive policies which ate into their profits. Others, like Karl Polanyi, painted a far gloomier picture. Having observed, at close quarters, the rise of fascism in interwar Europe, he argued that capitalism was fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Polanyi’s ideas have undergone a marked revival in the past two decades.
With the collapse of Keynesianism and the rise of neoliberalism, socioeconomic inequality has gained new salience, something which has once more put India at the very centre of debates over capitalism. Thomas Piketty, the author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, is the last thinker which Cassidy profiles. Piketty and his colleagues have recently released the World Inequality Report 2026, which contains some sobering statistics about India. The top 1% of Indians control 40% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% control only 15%. It is for this reason that the Report singles out India for special attention: “In India, inequality remains among the highest in the world and has shown little movement in recent years.”
Around the world, Cassidy believes that right-wing authoritarianism is no mere passing phase. Its endurance derives, in part, from the failure of left-liberal parties to address persistent inequality as well as the secession of labour from left-wing coalitions.
Cassidy mentions that he became interested in writing about the longer history of capitalism after observing how both Bernie Sanders, a socialist, and Donald Trump tapped popular anger about neoliberal capitalism during the 2016 American presidential elections.
And in Trump, we have, perhaps, a fitting rejoinder to those who believe that the end of capitalism is nigh: a man who has extracted profit, both political and financial, from attacking the system which made him rich in the first place.
Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.
Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.
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