Jonathan Levy’s Ages of Capitalism, one of the first large-scale and synthetic works to pull together much of the new interest and interpretive orientation of this history-of-capitalism field, thereby fills an important intellectual need. It is an ambitious and impressive book, a cut above much of the recent literature not only in its scale but in its determination to construct a historical arc based on clearly articulated concepts. It may also share much more with the older, “consensus” view than Levy or the many other scholars who embrace his perspectives would care to think.
Unlike many who have been writing on the history of American capitalism, Levy explains how capitalism should be defined and identifies its stages of development and geographical variations. Also unlike many of his peers, Levy is not just offering an “economic” history: His book is a study of changing political economies and the attendant cultural manifestations (save for religion). Some of the best pages in the first half of Ages of Capitalism are, in fact, devoted to literature, social thought, and popular culture, to the ways in which Americans grappled with the challenges that capitalist relations and values presented and the ways in which capitalism reshaped the contours of everyday life. Levy has a grasp of economic theory that should satisfy even skeptical readers from the field of economics, together with a rich historical perspective that economists generally lack if not dismiss.
Current scholarly avoidances notwithstanding, capitalism has been understood in a variety of ways: as a form of labor exploitation and surplus extraction; as the privatization of property and the expanding circulation of commodities; as a large and increasingly interconnected web of production and exchange; and as all of these put together in multiple dimensions. Immanuel Wallerstein and, more recently, Sven Beckert have insisted on understanding capitalism as a world system with complex and differentiated parts. Levy does not engage with these interpretations; perhaps for the benefit of general readers, he simply lays out his own. Capitalism, Levy writes, is “capital.” Lest anyone imagine that this is just a tautology, he explains that capital is not a thing but a “process” in which a legal asset is imbued with a pecuniary value in view of its capacity to yield future gain. This is not just the profit motive, which Levy acknowledges has existed from time immemorial; instead, it is a historically specific form of investment in which money, credit, and finance are the crucial components, and the empowerment of capital’s owners (i.e., the capitalists) has been the result.