Dismal (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Shortest History of Economics. By Andrew Leigh, Old Street Publishing, 2024

Thomas Carlyle described economics as ‘the dismal science’. But Carlyle was a racist, writing in 1849, who believed slavery should be reintroduced in the West Indies. The ‘dismal’ view he was attacking was the economics of the time which he saw as regarding all peoples as equal (and not, as is commonly supposed, to the dismal Malthus doctrine of overpopulation and famine). Andrew Leigh’s book on the history of economics is, he tells us, ‘the story of capitalism’. Capitalism is defined as the existence of markets and economics studies how people ‘maximise their wellbeing in the face of scarcity.’ Scarcity is an important assumption made by most economists. Just as the slaves in the markets of the West Indies were subjected to deliberate scarcity, it avoids economists having to confront the artificial scarcity of modern capitalism for wage slaves.

Leigh endorses Thomas Hobbes‘s view of human life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. ’Hobbes was right’, declares Leigh, and he argues that human history has been a long struggle to overcome that condition. With the application of the correct economics, of course. However, Hobbes’s view was not based on anthropological or archaeological evidence but on the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651. He fled to France while the civil war raged and while there wrote Leviathan, published in 1651, from which the above quote is taken. In Hobbes’s hypothetical ‘state of nature’ (that is, human nature) a ’war of all against all’ exists and this calls for an authoritarian state to keep the peace. There can be no doubt that much of human history is a record of struggles, but if Hobbes was correct the ‘war of all against all’ should have meant that we would all still be living in caves, without hope for the future.

The fact that human productivity has increased enormously since settled agriculture took place about 10,000 years ago has mainly been due to the adoption of new technologies, not the following of economics wisdom. Leigh claims that at the turn of the twentieth century the Englishman Alfred Marshall ‘was the world’s most influential economist’. In academia perhaps, but the accolade surely belongs to Karl Marx. Leigh doesn’t mention him, and that’s probably just as well. A running argument of this book is the alleged superiority of capitalism over communism in practice. The 1917 Russian revolution was a ‘communist revolution’. Cuba established a ‘communist dictatorship’. East Germany had ‘communist rule’. North Korea has had ‘decades of communism’. They all failed miserably, of course, but none of those regimes claimed to have established communism. Leigh is by no means alone in making this mistake but it is a serious flaw in his book. So when he writes of Russia and China that they have recently ‘transitioned from communism to capitalism, this is simply not true. No country in the world has claimed to have established communism. Ever.

Lew Higgins