THE HISTORY OF SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM, by Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson

A Brief Book Summary from Books At a Glance

by Benjamin J. Montoya, PhD

 

About the Authors

Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies, Harvard, where he served for twelve years as the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; his focus is classics and military history.

 

Table of Contents

Capitalism, Socialism, and Nationalism: Lessons from History
Our Socialist Future?

 

Summary

 

Capitalism, Socialism, and Nationalism: Lessons from History

Capitalism and socialism are words commonly used that remain important to understand. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership of the means of the production where investment is governed by private decisions and prices, production, and the distribution of goods and services are determined mainly by competition in a free market. Capitalists tend to focus on extolling economic growth that their system creates. 

Socialism is an economic and political system in which collective or governmental ownership and control plays a major role in the production and distribution of goods and services, and in which governments frequently intervene in or substitute for markets. Socialists focus on the egalitarian nature of their system and argue that socialism is more compassionate in outcomes than is the free market. 

It has been routinely claimed that capitalism leads to socialism because of supposed inherent problems with capitalism:

1. Creative disruption is rarely popular
2. Capitalism itself tends towards oligopoly
3. Intellectuals are susceptible to socialism
4. Many bureaucrats and politicians are also susceptible to socialism

Socialism has presented itself as the solution to the problems capitalism supposedly has. It claims that if the government owned real estate and the means of production that the problems of socialism would be solved. Popular advocates of socialism have been the likes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. 

Adherents of socialism have made some valid critiques of capitalism. For example, inequality did rise because of the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, with that, more income went to the top 5% of society. So, as economic growth occurs, it is not equal in the sense that socialists consider equal. . . .

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