Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx

The end of capitalism is always around the corner. Why do we keep predicting its demise, and how has it survived so many external shocks and internal contradictions? Francesco Boldizzoni traces the history of a prophecy unrealized and identifies the source of capitalism’s durability: its rootedness in Western social hierarchies and individualism.

Table of Contents:
Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Introduction One. Sitting on the Edge of Apocalypse Two. The Interwar Revival of Prophecy Three. Hopes Betrayed Four. The End of History and What Followed Five. Wanderings of the Predictive Mind Six. How Capitalism Survives Notes Acknowledgments Index

Review :
A sprawling, informative, thought-provoking, and opinionated history of ideas. -- Andrew Stuttaford Wall Street Journal Is this the beginning of capitalism's end? If you think it might be--whether you are eagerly awaiting capitalism's collapse or anxiously anticipating it--Francesco Boldizzoni's new book...will make you think twice. -- Alyssa Battistoni Boston Review Boldizzoni has a deep familiarity with the thinking of both the anti-capitalist left and the pro-capitalist right, and his discussion of the intellectual evolution of various factions within both camps is superb. -- Ryan Cooper Washington Monthly Lively and wide-ranging...Moves briskly across a century and a half of intellectual history, from Marx and John Stuart Mill in the mid-19th century (when the term 'capitalism' entered the lexicon) to the aftermath of the 2008 crash. -- The Nation Takes us on a 200-page tour of capitalism's critics, from the well-worn fields of Marx, Mill and Keynes through the wilder thickets of critical theory. -- The Spectator An intellectual achievement...Foretelling the End of Capitalism will be an excellent reference point for debating the future of capitalism and human history. -- Hans G. Despain Marx & Philosophy Review of Books A wide-ranging historical essay on the social-scientific forecasting of capitalism's fate. -- Jonathan Levy Journal of Modern History This beautifully written book captures the peculiar complicity between hope and disappointment that characterizes prophecies about the end of capitalism over the last three centuries. It will be of great interest to readers, both as a cautionary tale about prophecy and as a model study of the logic of capitalism itself. -- Arjun Appadurai, New York University Francesco Boldizzoni shows how predicting the collapse of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. He illuminates a tradition of economic thinking that has justified do-nothing posturing in the name of revolution, and how it resists learning lessons of its own failures. This book is also a brilliant study of the cult of forecasting. -- Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University Foretelling the End of Capitalism is an essential book for anyone interested in intellectual history and political economy. It will play a major role in current debates on capitalism and its future, as well as on crisis and crisis theory. -- Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End? Boldly written and brimming with new insights on every page, this is not your grandfather's old and staid intellectual history. Boldizzoni takes us through a fast-paced history of capitalism's failed doomsayers--only to then explain why they clearly underestimated its elongated life expectancy and stubborn durability. A superb intellectual history of how people have (wrongly) predicted and imagined the end of capitalism from the time of Marx until today. -- Eli Cook, author of The Pricing of Progress