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Liberalism and Capitalism Today
Paul-Jacques Lehmann
First published 2021 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
© ISTE Ltd 2021
The rights of Paul-Jacques Lehmann to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934587
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-689-0
Introduction
When you have a book on capitalism and liberalism in your hands, most of the time, you find yourself faced with a debate based either on a panegyric praising the benefits of these two systems or on a purely critical ideology and hackneyed arguments that have been heard many times. Our objective is different: first, we will show how these systems appeared historically, then examine their evolution over time up to the present day, both in terms of their advantages and their dysfunctions.
Indeed, we can only understand the present by drawing on the past. However, we know that the explanations concerning the circumstances in which liberalism and capitalism emerged and developed are numerous and the object of these interpretations is often contradictory. The choice made in this book was not to present, compare and contrast all these analyses. It is obviously subjectable to criticism and will be criticized because it is based on numerous demonstrations. It seemed interesting to us to refer to causes, mostly economic, but also historical, political, legal and sociological causes.
For this, we have essentially called upon two authors recognized in all these fields: first, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville1, followed by someone who is considered his successor, the Austrian Max Weber2. These forerunners of sociology, as well as historians and politicians, used this nascent science to explain the history of humanity and, thus, also of liberalism and capitalism. Moreover, both had the advantage, certainly, of being liberals in the political domain, but “troubled” moderate liberals, according to Raymond Boudon3, in the economic domain; they were favorable a priori to capitalism, but did not hide their questions in the face of the already present drifts of this system in their time, for which they foresaw, with lucidity, an acceleration of the pitfalls in the future. We will also touch on the economic explanations of the first liberals, in particular Adam Smith, and of more contemporary authors, for example Schumpeter and Hayek, who refer to modern liberalism and capitalism.
By exploring the contributions of these writers, the idea behind this book is to try to understand how the evolution of the general environment of civilization has led first to the emergence of a new way of approaching economic life and the problems associated with it, and subsequently to its development thanks to innovations in numerous fields (legal, institutional, technical, etc.).
This first part of the book thus enables us to consider the evolution of liberalism and capitalism by investigating whether the conditions that presided over their emergence are, at the dawn of the 21st century, still present, and whether the hypotheses put forward as to their appearance with regard to human behavior are still relevant at the dawn of the third decade of the 21st century, at a time when the globalization of the economy, a thousand leagues away from the situation that existed at the birth of these two systems and being one of the conditions of their existence, is increasingly
