Jeffrey Friedman and Shterna Friedman

CAPITALISM AND THE JEWISH INTELLECTUALS

In Capitalism and the Jews, Jerry Z. Muller attempts to resolve Milton Friedman’s paradox: Why is it that Jewish intellectuals have been so hostile to capitalism even though capitalism has so greatly benefited the Jews? In one chapter Muller answers, in effect, that Jewish intellectuals have not been anticapitalist. Elsewhere, however, Muller implicitly explains the leftist tendencies of most intellectuals*Jewish and gentile*by unspooling the anticapitalist thread in the main lines of Western thought, culminating in Marx but by no means ending with him. Thus, Milton Friedman saw a paradox where none existed. This may have been because Friedman was an economist, and economics is the one strand of Western thought that is, by and large, procapitalist. To an economist, opposition to capitalism may be paradoxical; to noneconomists, economics is alienating in its form and in its content. There is thus no mystery as to why intellectuals, including Jewish intellectuals, tend to shun economics and therefore gravitate to the left.

ABSTRACT:

In 1972, Milton Friedman (no relation) delivered a lecture to the Mont Pelerin Society, an international association of free-market economists founded in 1947 by F. A. Hayek. Friedman asked why the Jews, who ‘‘owe an enormous debt to free enterprise and competitive capitalism,’’ have ‘‘for at least the past century . . . been consistently opposed to capitalism and have done much on an ideological level to undermine it.’’ In Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton University Press, 2010), Jerry Z. Muller takes his title and agenda from Friedman’s lecture. Muller’s response to Friedman’s paradox loosely unifies the book’s four Jeffrey and Shterna Friedman, [email protected], Critical Review Foundation, P.O. Box 869, Helotes, TX 78023, thank Peter Boettke, Daniel Friedman, Malka Lowenstein, Ilya Somin, and especially Jerry Muller for their comments on earlier drafts. Critical Review 23(1 2): 169–194 # 2011 Critical Review Foundation

ISSN 0891-3811 print, 1933-8007 online DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2011.574479

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chapters*on the Christian condemnation of usury and therefore of the Jews (Chapter 1); on how Jews thrived under, and responded intellectually, to capitalism (Chapter 2); on Jewish participation in socialist and communist political movements (Chapter 3); and on Zionism (Chapter 4)*as Muller is interested in both sides of Friedman’s paradox: Jews’ success under capitalism (discussed by Joel Mokyr [2011] elsewhere in these pages) and their attitudes toward it. We confine ourselves here to their attitudes. Muller’s thesis is that for doctrinal reasons, Christians responded with hostility to the Jews’ economic success, particularly as moneylenders (Chapter 1). In turn, Jews responded to anti-Semitism either by isolating themselves from gentile society in haredi communities, such as those of today’s Brooklyn Hasidim, or by following the haskalah tradition of secularism. Among the secularized Jews of the early twentieth century, a liberal mainstream coexisted with two main ideologies: socialism (Chapter 3) and Zionism (Chapter 4). The latter was made doubly necessary by the rise of European nationalisms in the nineteenth century, which added to long-standing anti-Semitism by defining Jews as foreigners living within the newly constructed European ‘‘nations.’’ In the crucial opening chapter*titled ‘‘The Long Shadow of Usury: Capitalism and the Jews in Modern European Thought’’*Muller lays out in fine detail the intellectual source of the European Jewish predicament: the long history of Aristotelian and Christian condemnations of usury as greedy and unproductive. As a result, Jews alone were allowed to be moneylenders, and some Jews became rich from the practice, but both their involvement in finance and their success at it ignited anti-Semitism. However, Muller’s main response to Friedman’s paradox is contained in Chapter 2. There, he contends that Friedman was wrong to think that Jews have been, in the main, anticapitalist. The notion that Jews are ‘‘ideological opponents of capitalism’’ is a ‘‘halftruth at best’’ (73).1 Muller sometimes means that Jews are indeed overwhelmingly on the left, but not because they are anticapitalist. At other times he means that they are not overwhelmingly on the left at all. Thus, while Jews disproportionately held prominent leadership positions in some socialist and communist parties, Chapter 3 argues that most Jews were not followers of these parties (and that most leaders of these parties were not Jews). However, Friedman’s lecture acknowledged this fact; he was using Jewish leadership of such parties to illustrate his impression that, in general, Jews tend to be anticapitalist.

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Another illustration of the point, according Friedman, is Jews’ tendency to vote disproportionately for left-of-center parties. In Chapter 2, Muller presents three speculative explanations for this fact: nostalgia for the early-twentieth-century days of Jewish left-wing and labor radicalism; leftist ideology as an ‘‘ersatz religion’’; and, in America, the perception that the Republican party ‘‘defin[es] American identity in Christian terms’’ (131). Friedman, however, was primarily concerned about Jewish thinkers and writers*not Jewish voters*because Jewish intellectuals have greatly influenced the climate of opinion that was the topic of his lecture. Friedman ([1972] 1988) was mainly worried about the larger leftward ‘‘trend in ideas,’’ which he thought was paradoxical in light of what he considered the undeniable success of capitalism in the postwar era. When confronted with the harsh realities of East German communism, for example, how could West German intellectuals continue to oppose capitalism? The ‘‘paradox’’ of Jewish intellectuals’ opposition to capitalism was a subset of this larger paradox.

Numbers vs. Influence Muller denies the existence of the sub-paradox by denying that Jewish intellectuals tended to be hostile to capitalism. He points out that ‘‘from the seventeenth century onward, Jewish intellectuals often argued in favor of commerce and capitalism’’ (109). In 1638, Rabbi Simone Luzatto contended that the Jews benefited Venice ‘‘since they possessed trading skills honed over centuries by their exclusion from other sources of livelihood’’ (110). In 1655, Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel tried to convince Oliver Cromwell to readmit the Jews into England, arguing that ‘‘God had implanted a commercial talent in the Jews in order to make them indispensable to the gentile nations’’ (111). In 1688, Josef Penso de la Vega published ‘‘the first treatise on the stock exchange’’ (113). In 1771, Isaac de Pinto ‘‘defended a conception of wealth understood as the maximization of exchange’’ (ibid.). In 1782, Moses Mendelssohn argued against laws that kept Jews from engaging in commerce, explaining that the Jews’ commercial abilities benefited all of society (11112). Muller also lists classical economist David Ricardo, originator of the theory of comparative advantage in international trade (114); and the University of Chicago’s Aaron Director, Gary Becker,

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Richard A. Posner*and Milton Friedman himself*as well as Israel M. Kirzner, Irving Kristol, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand (125): modern Jewish intellectuals who support (or supported) capitalism. This list does not justify Muller’s claim that ‘‘Jewish intellectuals have often embraced capitalism as a boon not only for the Jews, but for society at large’’ (74, our emphasis). Even granting that Muller omitted many possibilities for inclusion on his list, such as philosopher Robert Nozick and a host of unmentioned Jewish economists, what matters is not numbers of intellectuals, but numbers of influential intellectuals. Arguably the most influential intellectual on Muller’s list is Ayn Rand, but Muller notes that ‘‘a suspicion of the moral and spiritual hazards presented by capitalism has been a recurrent motif of both Jewish preaching and of the Jewish novel’’ (127). This is true not only of the Jewish novel, but of secular novels by Jews*and novels in general. Ayn Rand is the only prominent Jewish novelist (and perhaps the only prominent novelist) with kind words for capitalism. It is hard to imagine that her influence outweighs that of the countless Jewish novelists who have conveyed to their readers ‘‘suspicion of the moral and intellectual hazards of capitalism.’’ Similarly, it is difficult to believe that Muller, a distinguished intellectual historian and the author of a pathbreaking examination of various European writers’ views of capitalism (Muller 2002), could be suggesting that the fourteen figures he names have had more of an impact on modern attitudes toward capitalism than*for example*Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, G. A. Cohen, Jacques Derrida, Andrea Dworkin, Ronald Dworkin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Max Horkheimer, Irving Howe, Naomi Klein, Jacques Lacan, Emanuel Levinas, Gyo¨ rgy Luka´ cs, Herbert Marcuse, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, Sean Wilentz, Naomi Wolf, Robert Paul Wolff, and Howard Zinn*leaving aside the hundreds of novelists, filmmakers, journalists, and other opinion leaders who could be listed, depending on one’s definition of ‘‘intellectual.’’ The question is: Which narratives have, thanks disproportionately to Jewish intellectuals, become more dominant*those that praise capitalism (or that even grant it Irving Kristol’s famous ‘‘two cheers’’), or those that condemn it? Muller comes closest to answering this question when he makes two offhand attempts to dismiss the most influential anticapitalist Jewish intellectual of all, Karl Marx.

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First, Muller contends that ‘‘if Marx is to be counted as evidence of the link between Jewish intellectuals and socialism, surely David Ricardo must weigh as heavily on the other side of the ledger’’ (114). Ricardo was a very important economist, but his work did not inspire mass movements with millions of adherents*nor intellectual currents so varied and sophisticated that one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers needed three densely packed volumes merely to survey them all (Kolakowski 1978a, 1978b, and 1978c). In the spirit of listmaking, a search of Google Books for ‘‘Karl Marx’’ turns up 3.2 million hits. A search for ‘‘David Ricardo’’ turns up 10,400 hits. Muller also contends that ‘‘to regard Karl Marx as a Jew is in many respects fallacious,’’ because ‘‘he neither knew much about Judaism nor thought of himself as a Jew, having been baptized a Lutheran as a child’’ (114). Yet earlier in the book Muller writes that in defining ‘‘Jews,’’ ‘‘it is probably more useful to consider not only those who identified as Jews, but also those who converted to Christianity, or to some secular form of identification as Jews, at least for a few generations after their departure from the Jewish fold . . . because in most European societies, Jewish converts and their immediate descendents were still regarded as in some sense ‘Jewish’ by the larger society’’ (75). Muller (2002, 169) remarks in his earlier book, The Mind and the Market, that Marx’s dark complexion earned him the nickname ‘‘the Moor’’*‘‘a tacit reference to his Semitic origins’’*so Marx fits Muller’s own definition of Jews.2 The appearance was not just skin deep. Marx’s father, Heinrich (formerly Heschel) Marx (formerly Markus, formerly Mordechai), was descended on both sides from long lines of rabbis, despite the fact that he converted so he could keep his job (McLellan 1970, 26 and 29). Marx’s maternal grandfather was also a rabbi (ibid., 27). Moreover, all of the Jewish intellectuals who would be of concern to Friedman*Jewish intellectuals who influence the climate of secular opinion*are, by definition, participants in the haskala, and secularism usually leads to a disregard for one’s religious (or ethnic) origins. If Marx was not a left-wing Jewish intellectual merely because he did not think of himself as one or know much about Judaism, then there have been very few Jewish intellectuals of any ideological stripe. Muller’s attempts to deny the existence of Friedman’s main dependent variable*disproportionately anticapitalist Jewish intellectuals*must be considered unsuccessful. But some of the explanations Muller offers for the left-wing tendencies of Jews in general might be applicable to Jewish intellectuals as well.

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Taking Jewish Leftists at Their Word Muller concedes that it is a true but historically contingent fact that socialism was popular among Jews*especially, but not exclusively, among working-class Jews*in Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That was in good part because at the time the socialists were the only movement that offered Jews the prospect of equal citizenship and social acceptance. In the decades after 1880, wave upon wave of Jewish immigrants brought these propensities with them, not only to the United States, but also to France, Britain, Canada, and to the Land of Israel. Often enough the first generation of immigrant Jews, facing social discrimination, wretched working conditions, and poverty, looked to socialism as an alternative, one that promised a neutral ground where Jew and gentile could meet as equals. (108)

However, Muller goes on to maintain that ‘‘with each successive generation, the hold of socialism became weaker. In the United States, it ended as a political force in the era of the New Deal. Socialism lived on in intellectual life, less as a program than as organized nostalgia and as a form of secular ethnic identification’’ (109). At first glance this seems reasonable enough. Socialism did go out with the Old Left. However, anticapitalism took many novel forms with the rise of the New Left, which was well underway when Friedman spoke. It would be misleading to confine our account of these new forms to new ‘‘isms,’’ such as Western or humanist Marxism, radical feminism, deep ecology, communitarianism,4 and post-structuralism. Absence of belief in ‘‘socialism’’ does not mean absence of hostility to capitalism. The chief aim of the New Left, after all, was to sever the left from its association with totalitarian ‘‘real existing’’ socialism, and this usually meant severing left-wing critiques of capitalism from positive programs or comprehensive ideologies of any kind. Further, Muller borrows a bad habit from Friedman in assuming that Jews did and should make their political decisions on ethnocentric grounds. Thus, Depression-Era Jewish socialism is supposed to have been based on the promise of ‘‘a neutral ground where Jew and gentile could meet as equals,’’ while contemporary Jews’ allegiance to the Democratic party is mere nostalgia and ‘‘secular ethnic identification.’’ We believe that few left-wing Jewish voters would agree. If Jewish immigrants had thought that socialism would aggravate ‘‘wretched working conditions’’

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and ‘‘poverty,’’ they would not have embraced it anyway merely because it promised an end to anti-Semitism. Jews whose main concern was antiSemitism might have been expected to become Zionists, not socialists* as, of course, many did*although most Zionists were also socialists. More pertinently, however, ethnocentrism contradicts egalitarianism, which was both the explicit justification of socialism and the reason that socialism seemed to promise, in addition to relief from poverty and wretched working conditions, relief from anti-Semitism. Muller is saying that however much Jews embraced socialism for egalitarion reasons, they also embraced socialism dishonestly: Under its universalist guise they could achieve particularist ends. This is possible, but the burden of proof is on Muller. The counterevidence is the words Jewish socialists spoke and wrote and read and the actions they took. This is not to say that people are fully consistent. Sometimes their beliefs contradict their actions. Psychological needs may unwittingly shape explicit ideas. Yet Muller gives us no reason to think that this was the case for the majority of Jewish socialists. Their actions and words correspond perfectly with each other and with the main explanation that most of them probably would have given for their actions and their words: Socialism promised relief from poverty and wretched working conditions*for all. The simplest explanation for Jewish socialism is the simplest explanation for socialism in general. But perhaps Muller’s dismissiveness is justified. Perhaps, as he claims, American Jews continue to turn leftward out of nostalgia for the LowerEast Side socialism of their immigrant great-great-grandparents, in the same nostalgic way that many secular Jews consume latkes and knishes. This begs the question, though. Latkes and knishes taste good; few Jews yearn for their great-great-grandmothers’ boiled chicken. If left-wing activism activates nostalgia, it is only because one thinks that in some sense ‘‘those were the good old days.’’ Evidently the poverty and wretched working conditions were not good, so why were the socialist politics good? The simplest explanation is that socialism promised to end poverty and wretched working conditions (for all). Muller asserts that ‘‘for some Jews, especially those most distant from traditional Judaism, ‘being on the Left’ has become an ersatz form of Jewish identity’’ (131). This, too, is possible. For instance, Jewish American Lori Berenson, who spent 15 years imprisoned in Peru for her association with a Marxist guerilla group, explains her radicalization by

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saying that she saw a movie about three American nuns who were killed in El Salvador. She said to herself, ‘‘Wow, it’s terrible, it’s not fair. They were helping poor people.’’ I wanted to be a nun. Of course you can’t do it if you’re not religious. You adopt another kind of religion, I guess, and that was sort of what I did. (Quoted in Egan 2011, 34).

Yet Berenson describes her ‘‘conversion’’ without needing to explain why she found helping poor people to be a sacred mission, or why becoming a Marxist revolutionary seemed to be a good way to achieve the mission. She takes these things to be obvious. If one dismisses her conversion as merely the adoption of an ‘‘ersatz’’ religion, one will never ask why she takes these things to be obvious. That is the question intellectual historians ask: Why do the people being studied believe what they believe? To the believer, one’s ‘‘religion’’ is simply the truth. Thus, the intellectual historian’s question becomes: Why is socialism*or, more accurately, hostility to capitalism, or suspicion of capitalism*the type of attitude that so many Jews, and Jewish intellectuals, and intellectuals in general, have taken to be self-evidently justified? In the same way that one cannot love on command, one cannot believe on demand. Berenson didn’t adopt a Marxist ‘‘religion’’ merely because she was in need of some ‘‘religion’’ to which she could devote her life, and willed herself into devoting herself to overthrowing capitalism. No, she needed to devote herself to a cause that was, to her, obviously good. Why did she, and so many others, think such causes were obviously good? Why do so many secular Jews turn to the ‘‘Torah of Liberalism,’’ as Norman Podhoretz (2009, ch. 34) calls it, instead of the Torah of Conservatism or the Torah of Libertarianism? Muller does not answer this question because he follows Friedman in assuming that Jews do, and should, reach political conclusions on the basis of the old question, ‘‘Is it good for the Jews?’’ For example, Friedman ([1972] 1988) suggests that Jews turn left in order to portray themselves as ‘‘public spirited, generous, and concerned with ideals rather than material goods,’’ thereby confounding anti-Semitic stereotypes. ‘‘How better to do so than to attack the market, with its reliance on monetary values and impersonal transactions?’’ This is, in fact, a vulgar-Marxist explanation, with the ethnic group standing in for the economic class. Here, political ideas are a mere mask for group self-interest, and the member

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of the group wills himself into believing, or pretending to believe, whatever ideas serve that interest. In the real world, though, people do not freely choose their beliefs. Their beliefs are involuntary reactions to their perceptions of reality* their ‘‘self-evident’’ truths. Dismissing twentieth-century Jewish leftism as a peculiarly ethnocentric belief system does not explain it, but it does explain it away, inhibit us from understanding the perceptions that seemed to make it the obviously righteous path.

Marx’s Universalized Anti-Semitism The dismissive approach of Chapter 2 contrasts starkly with Chapter 1, where Muller shows us that Marx accepted as true the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews. This is intellectual history of the sort to which Muller’s readers are accustomed: genuine absorption in Marx’s ideas, as Marx might have understood them. Moreover, it represents a tremendous addition to our understanding of Marx (developed more fully in The Mind and the Market). Marx claimed to be presenting a purely scientific, value-free argument about the inevitable tendencies of capitalism, based on historical research, notwithstanding the many passages in Marx expressing outrage at capitalism. Muller explains that Marx’s outrage followed the main line of classical, medieval, and early modern European economic thought, which condemned usury and usurers. Aristotle ‘‘regarded the lending of money for the sake of earning interest as unnatural’’ (21). Dante portrayed the moneylender in hell (22). Thomas Aquinas argued that ‘‘money was sterile by nature’’ (23). Martin Luther was ‘‘stricter than the [Christian] canonists’’ in condemning usury (26). Voltaire began the secularization of this tradition (31), even though he admired the pacifying effects of commerce on sectarian conflict. Marx, according to Muller, worked a transformation on the European tradition. He accepted the anti-Semites’ hostility toward usury, personified by ‘‘the greedy Jew,’’ as correct. But Marx’s ‘‘big idea was that capitalism was the rule of money*itself the expression of greed’’ (42). Marx thus ascribed to everyone in capitalist society the traits prejudicially associated only with Jews. He used lurid images of parasites, vampires, and cannibals to argue that a system based on money, which begets only usury/profit, is not only unjust and unproductive, but creates narrowly

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materialistic, calculating, egoistic monsters ‘‘uninterested in anything but getting richer’’ (3644). Muller suggests that the anti-Semites were onto something (perhaps he would disagree). For Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, ‘‘worldly survival [had] meant the ability to cultivate a rational-economic ethos, based on maximizing profitability, assessing risk, exploring new markets, and minimizing consumption to maximize the accumulation of capital’’ (87). This might be seen as an unnatural, neurotic disposition that can cause great psychological distress, a disposition that is not confined to Jews. Weber ([1921] 1958) recognized this by explaining that the same disposition among Calvinists was due to their worry that they would not be among the elect. They became members of the species Homo economicus so they could pile up wealth that would reassure them about their fate in the hereafter. One does not necessarily have to oppose capitalism to oppose these psychological effects: one can turn to consumerism, which, as Daniel Bell (1976) pointed out, undermines the work ethic that Weber found so pointless and joyless. One can seek work that is intrinsically satisfying instead of being merely a means to the end of money. One can follow Thoreau and simplify one’s life. One can, to the extent possible, shrink one’s sphere of instrumental relationships and enlarge the sphere where one can be instead of calculating, love instead of worrying, enjoy instead of defering*Weber’s ‘‘erotic sphere’’ (Weber 1946, 34350). One can try, as Marx ([1845] 1977, 169) predicted would be possible for the postcapitalist human being, to ‘‘do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.’’ However, these post-materialist possibilities were not realistic in, say, 1844, when Marx wrote ‘‘On the Jewish Question.’’ And for most people today, they are still not feasible options. This leaves them ceaselessly struggling to organize their lives around Mammon, and not liking it. In Muller’s discussion of Marx’s critique of capitalism, then, we have one plausible answer to the larger question of why so many people*not only Jews, and not only intellectuals*have found Marxism in particular, and anticapitalism in general, attractive. Had Muller followed this explanation in Chapter 2, he might have been able to resolve Friedman’s paradox, since Jews other than Marx might, like him, have been particularly sensitive to the stereotypically ‘‘Jewish’’ aspects of capitalist society, and thus particularly eager to oppose them.

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Explaining the Paradox Jewish intellectuals would be particularly suited to oppose them. Being highly educated, they likely would have been exposed to the sophisticated literature of Marxism and its various intellectual offshoots. Muller notes that Jews have come ‘‘to be heavily represented on the faculties of American universities, including the most prestigious, comprising one-quarter of the faculty of the Ivy League’’ (102). This opens a window into the political leanings not only of Jewish intellectuals, who are highly academicized, but of intellectuals in general, who are equally academicized, and of Jews in general*80 percent of whom were, by 1970, graduating from college (ibid.). Lori Berenson experienced her ‘‘conversion’’ under the tutelage of a (Jewish) MIT professor of anthropology (Egan 2011, 34). Needless to say, Simone Luzatto, Menassah ben Israel, Josef Penso de la Vega, and Isaac de Pinto are not on very many college or graduate syllabi in any field and, with the exception of Mendelssohn, the other Jewish intellectuals on Muller’s list would be taught only in economics courses*if they would be taught at all. Marx, in contrast, enjoys unparalleled prominence in courses ranging from anthropology to linguistics to women’s studies, even when he speaks only through Althusser, Barthes, Baudrillard, Beauvoir, Bourdieu, Deleuze, DuBois, Eagleton, Foucault, Gramsci, Habermas, Hobsbawm, Kristeva, Macˇ izˇek. The Intyre, Macpherson, Negri, Said, Sorel, Thompson, West, or Z most comprehensive recent study of the political views of America’s 630,000 college professors finds that fully 18 percent of those teaching in the social sciences identify themselves as ‘‘Marxists’’ (Gross and Simmons 2007, 41). Of course, Marxism has usually influenced those who do not so identify. And while Marxism remains the most important single strand of left-wing thought, one does not need to be a Marxist to be suspicious of ‘‘the moral and spiritual hazards presented by capitalism’’*or its economic hazards. In addition to the 18 percent of American socialscience professors who identify themselves as Marxists, Neil Gross and Solon Simmons (2007, 41) find that 24 percent of social scientists classify themselves as ‘‘radicals’’ and 21 percent as ‘‘activists,’’ and that selfidentified liberal social scientists outnumber conservatives by almost 13

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to 1 (ibid., Table 2).4 Among humanities professors, 5 percent selfidentify as Marxists, 19 percent as radicals, and 26 percent as activists. This resolves the ‘‘paradox.’’ Milton Friedman said it well: Perhaps ‘‘the Jewish anti-capitalist mentality simply reflects the general tendency for intellectuals to be anti-capitalist plus the disproportionate representation of Jews among intellectuals.’’ This pushes the question back a level, though, to why there is a general tendency for intellectuals to be anticapitalist. The answer may be just as straightforward. Intellectuals spend their adult lives reading literature that, when it has a political charge, almost always has a left-wing charge. This situation has only intensified since Marx’s day. But even then, as Muller suggests in Chapter 1, it was by no means unusual for a European intellectual to be offended by capitalism. Thus, we don’t have to ascribe special significance to Marx’s Jewish origins. Nor is it necessary to say that contemporary Jewish left-wing intellectuals*most of whom, fortunately, have never experienced antiSemitism*are especially sensitive to the implications of anti-Semitic stereotypes. Most intellectuals, from Marx forward, have been highly educated, and nowadays most intellectuals are professors in the humanities and social sciences. They are trained in intellectual traditions that Muller suggests were inherently anti-capitalist long before Marx. The Industrial Revolution brought forth new versions of anticapitalist literature, and variants of anticapitalism continue to proliferate.

The Real Anomalies Who, by contrast, would an intellectual, of any ethnicity, encounter on ‘‘the other side’’? The answer is signified by Muller’s list of pro-capitalist Jewish intellectuals. Eleven out of the fourteen, including all of the obscure rabbis, were, in effect, economists. Only economists are equipped to argue that capitalism helps the poor, even though the Industrial Revolution created the opposite impression. Hayek (1954), for example, noted that with industrialization came urbanization; in consequence, the literate classes of Europe saw (or heard reports of) the poverty that had for centuries been spread out and prettified in the rural landscape. Once factories opened, impoverished peasants by the tens of thousand began flocking to cities to take these jobs, creating scenes of wretchedness that shocked educated sensibilities.

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Rather than crediting capitalism for offering these workers better opportunities than they had had as peasants, however, European intellectuals blamed capitalists’ greed for causing the newly urban workers’ poverty. The essence of the initial intellectual reaction to capitalism was thus compassion for the workers and revulsion at the factory owners for profiting from the workers’ misery. New versions of the same reaction, reinforced by previous intellectuals’ impressions, and by their theories about the causes of the misery, have always driven the left and continue to do so. Muller’s second chapter obscures this reality. His first chapter, however, goes a long way toward explaining why the intellectuals’ negative reaction to capitalism was foreordained in Europe. Educated observers of industrialization, such as Marx or Engels, would have been primed by Christian intellectual traditions to oppose an economy ‘‘built on avarice and selfishness’’ (33). Marx helped secularize these traditions, as did many later intellectuals of all religious origins. Even in Chapter 1, however, Muller finds Marx’s anticapitalist reaction to industrialization*and thus, by implication, the reactions of all subsequent left-wing intellectuals*‘‘curiously archaic,’’ for in Muller’s view, anticapitalist attitudes had been shown to be unwarranted by ‘‘Adam Smith and his disciples’’ (41): economists. This unnecessarily problematizes Marx’s anticapitalist attitude, which Muller’s own argument shows to be perfectly understandable given Marx’s education. The only thing that makes Marx’s response to capitalism curious to Muller is that, in agreeing with the British economists, Muller disagrees with Marx, even though it would have been typical for someone like Marx to disagree with the British economists. Thus, Muller opens his discussion of Marx by saying that his ‘‘background and personality help account for fundamental elements of his social theory,’’ suggesting that we view Marx’s arguments*including his critique of Adam Smith and his disciples*as epiphenomena of his personal psychohistory. Muller continues: Marx was the son of a highly secularized Jewish father, Heinrich Marx, who had converted to Lutheranism in order to be able to practice law in Prussia. Heinrich’s wife converted shortly thereafter, and the couple had their children converted, including Karl, their eldest son. Karl Marx’s origin was as a member of a minority stigmatized for its religion, regarded as a separate nationality, and disdained for its economic role. His vision of

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the Communist future posited a society in which religious and national differences would be obliterated, and moneymaking abolished. (3435)

The charitable reading of this passage is that Muller wants us to see how Marx’s personal history allowed him, unlike gentile anti-Semites, to ‘‘recognize’’ that not merely Jewish bankers, but all participants in capitalism, personified greed. The uncharitable reading is that Muller wants us to conclude that, if we are lucky enough not to have a background shaped by anti-Semitism, as Marx did, then we, too, should find his ideas curiously archaic. Maybe we should; but if so, it would be because we agreed with certain arguments of Adam Smith and his disciples with which Marx disagreed. Let us assume, with Muller, that Marx (and his disciples) had the wrong side of this disagreement. If so, it is not curious at all. People (even brilliant Jewish intellectuals) make mistakes, and there is no reason to find this perplexing: All people are fallible. Mistakes need not be explained away as a product of biographical circumstance, or as ersatz religion or nostalgia; especially when the weight of the cultural traditions absorbed by Marx and his followers would naturally blame the profit motive for the conditions of the industrial workers in England. The conditions were devastatingly evoked by Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England ([1844] 1958). Muller writes that ‘‘for Engels, trade stood condemned, in the first instance, for the impurity of motivation that lay behind it. Morality, by definition, could not be based on selfinterest’’ (4142, emph. original). Given this assumption, which was absolutely foundational to Western thought*and remains so*the truly curious thing is that Adam Smith, preceded by Bernard Mandeville, had been able to argue that self-interested actions could produce moral outcomes. Smith’s butcher, brewer, and baker provide their customers with nourishment even if they are not motivated by their customers’ well-being. They help the poor even though their motive may be ‘‘impure,’’ that is, greedy. From this acorn grew the tree of economics. This tree has many branches, some of them rotten. Those who find its fruit objectionable, or who have not tasted of it, are not paradoxes; they simply disagree with certain versions of economics or are ignorant of the field as a whole. Only if particular economic teachings were manifestly true and universally taught as such would we be right to consider ‘‘curiously archaic’’ those who are ignorant of these teachings or who disagree with them. But Smith’s teaching is the opposite of being self-evidently true.

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It is counterintuitive. Otherwise it would not have taken five thousand years of recorded history for someone to produce it. And it is not at all widely taught, even today.

The Left and Economics Economics is the missing variable in the paradoxical equation formulated by Friedman and resisted by Muller. Ignorance of, or disagreement with, free-market economic ideas explains the anticapitalism of Jews*and gentiles; intellectuals*and ordinary voters (Bennett and Friedman 2008). Given the counterintuitive nature of these teachings and the weight of Western thought that opposes them, the only real paradox is not that so many intellectuals, Jewish or not, oppose capitalism; but that anyone, intellectual or not, supports capitalism. Consider once again survey research on the political attitudes of U.S. liberal-arts faculty. Unaccountably, Gross and Simmons do not provide discipline-by-discipline breakdowns of self-identified liberals, conservatives, radicals, activists, and Marxists, but they do provide breakdowns for self-identified party preference. Seven percent of America’s psychology professors think of themselves as Republicans, as do 6 percent of its sociology professors, 6 percent of its political scientists, 4 percent of its history professors*and 29 percent of its economics professors (Gross and Simmons 2007, Table 8). That is, there are proportionately about five times as many Republican professors of economics as Republican professors in any other social science. Perhaps an even better heuristic for the difference that economics makes can be seen in libertarianism, the most extreme procapitalist political movement. The founders of this movement include three of Muller’s fourteen procapitalist Jewish intellectuals*Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises*as well as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard. All of them were not merely Jewish; they were professional economists or were directly influenced by one of the professional economists on the list, Mises. Mises’s ideas, conveyed to Ayn Rand by Henry Hazlitt and later by Mises directly, turned Rand, a Nietzschean, anticommunist Russian e´ migre´ , into an anticommunist Russian e´ migre´ with a radically procapitalist message (Burns 2009, 68 and 142). Mises was also Rothbard’s mentor. Rothbard is relatively unknown, but it was he

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who devised the package of ideas that is now familiar as ‘‘libertarianism’’: radical free-market economics; no restrictions on personal liberties; a noninterventionist foreign policy (something Rand rejected); and, most importantly, the forced marriage between a priori arguments for the ‘‘justice’’ of laissez faire and consequentialist arguments for the economic benefits of it.5 Finally, Mises’s economics persuaded Robert Nozick, then a founder of the Columbia University chapter of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (the precursor of SDS), to abandon socialism for libertarianism, leading to his Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) (Doherty 2007, 48485). Without economics, in short, there would be no libertarianism. This helps to explain the near-universal revulsion against libertarianism among most intellectuals. Libertarianism is thus a small instance of the larger disconnect between ‘‘Adam Smith and his disciples’’ and the general tendencies of Western intellectual history. From Muller’s remarks about the ‘‘archaic’’ nature of Marx’s ideas, one might think that Adam Smith’s reasoning was universally recognized as superseding previous Western understandings of commerce and finance; that economic theory has eradicated hostility to capitalism among intellectuals; or that economics is the most influential social science. None of this is true. It is true that unlike any other social science, economics directly and regularly affects public policy. But economics has a relatively small longterm impact on the ‘‘trend in ideas’’ that concerned Milton Friedman. Most future intellectuals do not major in economics and never take a single course in that field. One reason is that economics has become highly mathematical, and future intellectuals are more likely to be verbally than mathematically gifted. A second reason is that the one thing outsiders to economics tend to have heard about it is that the discipline uses unrealistic assumptions*such as perfect competition and perfect knowledge*to reach what seem to be predetermined ideological (procapitalist) conclusions. But a third reason is that economics tends to live down to the same stereotype of Adam Smith and his followers that, Muller argues, alienated Marx and Engels from economics. ‘‘In an early essay of 1844, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,’’’ Muller writes, Engels laid out in embryonic form many of the ideas that he and Marx were to spend the rest of their lives developing. The essence of Engels’s critique of political economy as it had developed in the work of Adam

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Smith and his disciples was that it obscured the basic truth that capitalism was built on avarice and on selfishness. If the key maneuver of Enlightenment thinkers such as Smith was to call attention to the social benefits of what had been previously stigmatized as ‘‘greed’’ and ‘‘pride,’’ the first countermaneuver of socialist critics like Engels was to restigmatize self-interest as greed. (33)

Ayn Rand (1964) is not the only procapitalist intellectual to have (one might say) fallen into Engels’s trap by trying to make a ‘‘virtue’’ out of selfishness. Economists commonly boil down their message to be: pecuniary incentives matter. Engels, in line with most of Western thought, condemned capitalism for the impurity of motivation that makes economic agents respond to pecuniary incentives. Economists appear not to understand that to those outside their field the mantra that ‘‘incentives matter’’ is precisely the reason to refuse economics a hearing. Yet this mantra does not even accurately describe what economics ‘‘is.’’ The lesson of Smith’s butcher, baker, and brewer can be understood as ‘‘incentives matter.’’ But it can also be understood in a slightly more sophisticated manner: despite the incentive of avarice, the butcher, brewer, and baker inadvertently benefit their customers, as if they were ‘‘incented’’ by their customers’ welfare. Thus, Smith is delivering a lesson in unintended consequences. (Nobody has put greater emphasis on this theme than Muller [1993, ch. 6], in Adam Smith in His Time and Ours.) Likewise, Mises ([1920] 1937) argued that once socialists gained power, their good intentions would be powerless to help their intended beneficiaries if they did not know how to do so. And (he claimed) they would not know how to do so, having abolished capitalism, since competition among capitalists produces capitalgoods prices that allow social resources to be allocated with relative efficacy toward meeting social needs. The unintended consequence of socialism would be to immiserate the working class, and everyone else. There are problems with Mises’s argument, as the subsequent ‘‘socialistcalculation debate’’ revealed (Lavoie 1985). Eventually Hayek (1964 and 1968) inferred that the fundamental issue is the complexity of the modern world. In a complex world, one is often ignorant about how to achieve an objective without causing a potentially worse outcome. Thus, Smith’s parable can be interpreted in yet another way: Regardless of the motivations of the butcher, brewer, and baker (who might, after all, be altruists, as many people are), competition among them and among other butchers, brewers, and bakers allows initially ignorant consumers to

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traverse a complex world, experimenting with how to achieve their objectives by trying one product and then another (Schumpeter 1950, 263). Muller has read deeply in economics. He not only wrote a brilliant work on Adam Smith (Muller 1993), but chapters of The Mind and the Market (2002) are devoted to Schumpeter and Hayek. This makes Muller a member of a very small minority in his field. To him, economics may have rendered anticapitalism archaic, but not to his fellow historians, who recoil at the apotheosis of ‘‘economic man.’’ The ubiquity of unintended consequences and the complex nature of modern reality could be natural organizing principles for historians*as well as anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and possibly even literature professors and novelists. Yet it is fair to say that most economists do not emphasize these ideas*not, at least, in comparison to the idea that ‘‘incentives matter,’’ which is, in some respects, the polar opposite of the ideas of unintended consequences and complexity. Focusing on incentives leads economists to attribute most outcomes to the deliberate intentions of social actors, which are typically frustrated in economic models, if they are frustrated at all, by the intentions of other social actors. This is a simplistic take on often-complex events because it consigns unintended consequences to the margins (Friedman and Kraus 2011, chs. 1 and 4). However, Muller’s chapter on usury points to an even deeper problem with emphasizing, in the context of our culture, that ‘‘incentives matter.’’ The incentives-based understanding of economics affirms that Engels was right about economists: They reduce human action to the avarice that made the anti-Semitic stereotype of ‘‘the Jew’’ such a powerful inducement to hatred. Marx universalized the stereotype in order to kill it*by overthrowing capitalism. Economists universalize it in order to praise it. They invite their students to resurrect Marx’s vampires and to see themselves, and everyone around them, as naturalborn members of the living dead. Students with intellectual inclinations are likely to refuse this invitation in droves*and they do. If, as a result, they have never heard a persuasive case for capitalism, it is no wonder that they wind up on the left. There is no paradox here.

The Self-Contained World of Economics Friedman’s explanation of why capitalism has been ‘‘good for the Jews’’ inadvertently shows how hard it is for economists to deal with the

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anticapitalist tradition on its own terms. Self-interested competition among employers, Friedman ([1972] 1988) argues, reduces discrimination. Firms that make hiring decisions based on religion or ethnicity rather than competence must pay a ‘‘tax’’ in foregone productivity compared to companies that hire according to ability. Thus, the lower the barriers to entry by competitors who might hire without discrimination, the likelier that Jews will succeed in a given field. The U.S. retail and movie industries, for instance, were originally ‘‘textbook image[s] of perfect competition and free entry’’; banking, for a while, had free entry, and thus Jewish bankers abounded. When state licensure was a higher entrance barrier in medicine than in law, American Jews became lawyers. And Jews are disproportionately intellectual, according to Friedman, because intellectual activity ‘‘is a highly competitive industry with almost completely free entry.’’ Friedman’s conclusion, then, is that Jews have seldom benefited from governmental intervention on their behalf. They have flourished when and only when there has been a widespread acceptance by the public at large of the general doctrine of non-intervention, so that a large measure of competitive capitalism and of tolerance for all groups has prevailed. They have flourished then despite continued widespread anti-Semitic prejudice because the general belief in non-intervention was more powerful than the specific urge to discriminate against the Jews. (Friedman [1972] 1988)

However, Friedman, gives a hostage to fortune: What about industries that are not textbook examples of perfect competition? Why shouldn’t government step in to police discrimination there, or to break up monopolies so that competition becomes more perfect? In applying his general argument to the Jews, Friedman wisely buttresses his purely economic reasoning with historical knowledge of legal barriers to entry, such as medical and legal licensing and banking regulation. Even Friedman could not make the case by merely assuming that since everyone is a Homo economicus, discrimination must be due to legal barriers to entry rather than simply to widespread prejudice. Economists who argue in that fashion will seem to be using unrealistic a priori assumptions to prove an a posteriori point; and this is how most economists argue. Friedman made his name with a massive work of economic history (Friedman and Schwartz 1963). But Friedman’s theorizing, qua theorizing, tends to put Marx’s vampires at the wheel. Few

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noneconomists will agree that we do, or should, relentlessly pursue selfinterest merely because this would sometimes have a nice side effect, such as reducing discrimination where barriers to entry are low. To succeed in the world of self-interest, one does well to be more cunning, ruthless, and uncaring than one’s competitors: Only the cultivation of these traits will, according to Friedman’s argument, make anti-Semites grit their teeth and hire ‘‘the Jew.’’ Friedman’s claim is not necessarily inaccurate, the picture he paints is not a beautiful one, so it is not mysterious that most people do not find it compelling. Noneconomists who were familiar with Friedman’s argument would ask: What can the cultivation of self-interested calculation portend for the most vulnerable among us? The ‘‘social question,’’ after all, has not gone away; its locus has merely moved to the developing world. Terry Eagleton (2011a, B9), the influential professor of literature whose most recent book is Why Marx Was Right (2011b), argues that today’s proletarians are to be found ‘‘in the sweatshops and on the small farms of the third world.’’ Emphasizing the self-interested ‘‘incentives’’ on which intellectuals such as Eagleton blame world poverty does not seem likely to change the climate of opinion about its causes.6 Eagleton is no more well informed about developing-world sweatshops than he is about economics. However, Nicholas D. Kristof* another non-economist: a journalist*may have done more than any other single person to illuminate the matter. While living in East Asia, he and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, encountered the actual circumstances that drive people to work in the sweatshops that, like industrial England’s dark, satanic mills, horrify modern sensibilities. Kristof has since become something of a specialist on the subject. In a 2009 story for the New York Times, for example, he describes the many Cambodians who work somewhere much worse than a sweatshop*in a garbage dump that is ‘‘a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires. The miasma of toxic stink leaves you gasping, breezes batter you with filth, and even the rats look forlorn.’’ It is also hot. Pim Srey Rath, one of the garbage-dump scavengers, would love to work in a sweatshop because ‘‘at least that work is in the shade.’’ Vath Sam Ouen ‘‘hopes her 10-year-old boy, scavenging beside her, grows up to get a [sweatshop] factory job, partly because she has seen other children run over by garbage trucks. Her boy has never been to a doctor or a dentist, and last bathed when he was 2, so a sweatshop job by

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comparison would be far more pleasant and less dangerous.’’ And ‘‘13year-old Neuo Chanthou, who earns a bit less than $1 a day scavenging in the dump . . . worries about her sister, who lost part of her hand when a garbage truck ran over her. ‘It’s dirty, hot and smelly here,’ she said wistfully. ‘A factory is better.’’’ Walter Lippmann ([1922] 1949, 53) wrote that ‘‘each of us lives and works on a small part of the earth’s surface, moves in a small circle, and of these acquaintances knows only a few intimately.’’ The world is far too big for us to know in any detail without others’ assistance, just as it is far too complex for us to understand without the help of theories. Kristof is helping his readers see part of the world they would never otherwise see. And economic theory can help us understand what Kristof describes, which is borne out by the systematic empirical research (Skarbek et al. 2011). The theory holds that people would not take jobs in sweatshops if they did not think this would serve their (or their children’s) self-interest. (The same reasoning could be applied to the Industrial Revolution, but it would not be persuasive without historical research.)7 However, is it fair to conclude from Kristof’s reportage, and from the research, that the answer to the social question is ‘‘incentives’’? Not exactly. If the sweatshops that are so desired by garbage-dump scavengers are built by greedy industrialists, the benefit to the former scavengers is an unintended consequence of greed; but not all unintended consequences are good, and greed can produce bad consequences, intended and unintended. Moreover, sweatshops can just as easily be built by altruistic industrialists, and their working conditions might be even more attractive to the former scavengers. The saving grace of capitalism is not that it ‘‘harnesses self-interest,’’ but that competition among capitalists unintentionally works to the benefit of the poor.

Paradoxes as Mutual Misunderstandings ‘‘Paradoxes’’ can signify multiple layers of ignorance. ‘‘Why would A do x, given that x would harm him? It is a paradox!’’ This assumes that x is indeed bad for A and that A knows it. Milton Friedman’s ‘‘paradox’’ is not the least bit paradoxical if the Jews who have benefited from capitalism have not heard economic arguments, such as his own, that claim to establish that capitalism is ‘‘good for the Jews.’’

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As we have emphasized, Friedman’s paradox also assumes that A is monomaniacally selfish, such that the criterion for A’s action must be (group) self-interest. However, public-opinion researchers have amply demonstrated that Western citizens tend to be sociotropic: They vote for the common good, not their own interests (Kinder and Kiewiet 1979 and 1981; Fiorina 1981; Lewin 1991). We should not expect Jews to be any different, and we know that anticapitalist Jewish intellectuals are no different because, by and large, they argue on the basis of what is good for everyone, not what is good for the Jews. In this dimension, Friedman’s paradox suggests his ignorance of the fact that, in the eyes of Jewish noneconomists, capitalism hurts the interests of all (all but the rich). The ‘‘paradox’’ is really a failure to understand those who disagree with the one who perceives the paradox. Misunderstandings*which can appear in the guise of paradoxes, attributions of sinister motives, diagnoses of irrationality, or demonization*abound in politics as in all aspects of life. When one finds oneself demonizing another or questioning his motives or sanity, one is at a crossroads: either one is ignorant of the reasons for the other person’s beliefs, or the other person is ignorant of what one oneself takes to be reasons for one’s own, contrary beliefs. In the first case, the response should be intellectual or cultural history in the broad sense, with the aim of bringing oneself to the point where the other’s perspective is not only sane and reasonable but inevitable. One can call this phenomenology; Weber called it Verstehen; Philip E. Converse ([1964] 2006, 6), applying the technique to political ideologues, wrote that their belief systems are experienced by ideologues ‘‘as logically constrained clusters of ideas, within which one part necessarily follows from another,’’ no matter how illogical they may actually be. Verstehen is useful, but it usually cannot be done a priori. When beliefs are involved, Verstehen requires a level of knowledge of the other’s reasons that can be difficult to achieve. To the extent that this problem can be mitigated, it is by hearing the strongest arguments put forth by those we want to understand; by observing their actions with sympathy; by reading the books, journals, and magazines they read; and by watching the films, television, and documentaries they watch. In the back of one’s mind, the intellectual-cultural historian has two questions: What is the cultural source of what I consider to be the other’s mistake? And*is it really a mistake?

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Thus, in his 1972 lecture, Friedman asked his fellow defenders of capitalism the following admirable question: Why have we been so unsuccessful in persuading intellectuals everywhere of our views? Our opponents would give the obvious answer: because we are wrong and they are right. Until we can answer them and ourselves in some other way, we cannot reject their answer, we cannot be sure that we are right. And until we find a satisfactory answer, we are not likely to succeed in changing the climate of opinion (Freidman [1972] 1988).

However, if one really wants to know whether ‘‘they’’ are right, one must also ask whether ‘‘we’’ are wrong. This leads to the other fork in the road: performing the same intellectual-cultural process on ‘‘our’’ beliefs and assumptions that we might perform on ‘‘theirs.’’ This task is even harder, for it requires that one bracket one’s belief in the truth of one’s beliefs and treat oneself as one would treat someone whose mistakes one is trying to trace: that is, that one treat oneself as a fallible, ignorant human being. Instead of assuming that x is true, such that the only autobiographical task is to discover when one ‘‘recognized’’ x, one should, for the sake of the exercise, proceed as if x is false, and try to find out why one mistakenly came to believe in its truth. One might even learn in this process that x really is false. Combining the two techniques is the only path we know out of the self-reinforcing loop of ideology. Without these techniques, groups caught in different loops can hardly avoid mutual misunderstanding. Muller (2002, xiv) gives a wonderful illustration in The Mind and the Market: One can . . . read all of the works of . . . Hayek, and never come across one of the key insights of . . . Herbert Marcuse, namely that the market is full of people trying to convince you to buy things that you don’t really need and for the sake of which you may end up sacrificing your time, pleasure, and creativity . . . On the other hand, one can read through all of Marcuse’s works and never encounter Hayek’s central insights that the market coordinates the manifold activities of individuals by relaying information not otherwise conveyable, and that it allows men and women with radically conflicting purposes to cooperate by focusing on shared means, thereby minimizing the need for consensus.

We would add that if we tried to understand Hayek by reading Marcuse, we would get nowhere. Marcuse would have found Hayek*

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or Friedman*to be a paradox. And if we try to understand Marcuse and his fellow left-wing intellectuals without reading them, we also get nowhere. Friedman and the other disciples of Adam Smith are baffled by the beliefs of those who disagree with them, but no wonder: Freemarket economists tend to be as uneducated in the views of anticapitalists as anticapitalists are in the views of free-market economists. The mutual misunderstanding can be reduced only through sympathetic attempts to understand ‘‘the other.’’ This requires gaining distance from one’s own assumptions, theories, and intellectual tradition. Muller, who understands free-market economics but is not himself a free-market economist, shows the power of distanciation in Chapter 1 of Capitalism and the Jews, sympathetically reconstructing the reasons that Marx found it imperative to oppose capitalism. Marx, however, was one leftist who knew his free-market economics. Most leftists do not, and they think they have good reasons*provided by Marx, among others* for not giving that tradition a sympathetic hearing. If those within that tradition are puzzled by those who ignore it, they need only look to their own exaggeration of the very tendencies in capitalism that Marx found repulsive.

NOTES 1. Elsewhere Muller (106) repeats that Friedman’s notion is ‘‘at best a half-truth.’’ 2. Muller concedes that two of his fourteen procapitalist Jewish intellectuals, Rand and Mises, were ‘‘nonidentifying Jew[s]’’ (125). 3. See Friedman 2002. 4. Fifty-nine percent consider themselves liberals while 5 percent consider themselves conservatives. 5. For a critique of this unholy union, see Friedman 1997. 6. No economist has provided a treatise on the effects of the Industrial Revolution that would approach Friedman and Schwartz’s accomplishment in their Monetary History of the United States. Hayek’s impressionistic little collection of essays, Capitalism and the Historians (1954), may be the closest thing to it. 7. The research would have to take into account the effects of the enclosure movement, which deprived many British peasants of traditional subsistence rights.

REFERENCES Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

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Bennett, Stephen Earl, and Jeffrey Friedman. 2006. ‘‘The Irrelevance of Economic Theory to Understanding Economic Ignorance.’’ Critical Review 20(3): 195 258. Burns, Jennifer. 2009. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. New York: Oxford University Press. Converse, Philip E. [1964] 2006. ‘‘The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.’’ Critical Review 18(1-3): 174. Doherty, Brian. 2007. Radicals for Capitalism. New York: PublicAffairs. Eagleton, Terry. 2010a. ‘‘In Praise of Marx.’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 April. Eagleton, Terry. 2010b. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven: Yale University Press. Egan, Jennifer. 2011. ‘‘The Liberation of Lori Berenson.’’ New York Times Magazine, 6 March. Engels, Friedrich. [1844] 1958. The Conditions of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fiorina, Morris. 1981. Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press. Friedman, Jeffrey. 1997. ‘‘What’s Wrong with Libertarianism.’’ Critical Review 11(3): 40767. Friedman, Jeffrey. 2002. ‘‘The Politics of Communitarianism and the Emptiness of Liberalism.’’ Ph.D. diss., Department of Political Science, Yale University. Friedman, Jeffrey, and Wladimir Kraus. 2011. Engineering the Financial Crisis: Systemic Risk and the Failure of Regulation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. 1963. A Monetary History of the United States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Milton. [1972] 1988. ‘‘Capitalism and the Jews.’’ In The Essence of Friedman, ed. Kurt R. Leube. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Gross, Neil, and Solon Simmons. 2007. ‘‘The Social and Political Views of American Professors.’’ Working paper, Harvard University and George Mason University. Hayek, F. A. 1954. ‘‘History and Politics.’’ In Hayek 1963. Hayek, F. A., ed. 1963. Capitalism and the Historians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. 1964. ‘‘The Theory of Complex Phenomena.’’ In Hayek 1967. Hayek, F. A. 1967. Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hayek, F. A. 1968. ‘‘Competition as a Discovery Procedure.’’ In idem, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kinder, Donald R., and Roderick D. Kiewiet. 1979. ‘‘Economic Discontent and Political Behavior: The Role of Personal Grievances and Collective Economic Judgments in Congressional Voting.’’ American Journal of Political Science 23: 495527. Kinder, Donald R., and Roderick D. Kiewiet. 1981. ‘‘Sociotropic Politics: The American Case.’’ British Journal of Political Science 11: 12961.

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