Robert L. Heilbroner
Discover how eccentric thinkers like Adam Smith and Karl Marx shaped modern history not through warfare, but by deciphering the radical new machinery of the capitalist market system.
The birth of the market system marked a revolutionary departure from societies governed by tradition or brutal coercion, allowing human survival to depend on the decentralized pursuit of individual profit.
Adam Smith revealed that the chaos of individual greed is miraculously organized by the invisible hand of competition, which regulates prices and directs labor to fulfill the needs of society.
The optimism of early capitalism was shattered by Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, who warned that unchecked population growth and the inevitable consolidation of wealth by landlords would trap the working class in perpetual misery.