The Relentless Revolution

By Joyce Appleby
Norton, $29.95, 494 pages

Books on Economics tend to be for economists; furthermore they tend to approach the subject as science.  Joyce Appleby’s The Relentless Revolution doesn’t pretend that economics is scientific or that its “laws” are anything more than theoretical models that function only in simulation.  Instead of presenting Capitalism in a model or a natural law, Appleby relates its history with all the contingencies and near misses that accompany all histories.  She exposes the lie that capitalism and free trade were an inevitable development; they were not.  Rather, Capitalism was impossible without the cultural revolution of the Renaissance, as well as the unique role of the British, how British laws controlling the economy eventually cost it the enormous economic lead capitalism gave it, and how that mantle passed both to the United States and Germany.  She relates how Capitalism helped create the uber-nationalism that contributed so much to both World Wars.  

“What ‘the best and the brightest’ of any generation choose as their life-work has a lot to do with the values they take in when they’re young.”

The Relentless Revolution covers not only all the good that Capitalism has given us, but also the racism, nationalism, and jingoism that it has fostered and encouraged.  Appleby’s work here is one of the first honest looks at how capitalism and economics works, not as a science but as a process continually created and recreated by the People.

Reviewed by Jonathon Howard