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The true aim of these “scholar activists,” as many academics have begun calling themselves, is to propagate socialism by redefining capitalism to encompass every evil of human history.

https://mises.org/wire/how-college-profs-push-students-socialism

Chris Calton

After the collapse of the housing market in 2008, professional historians gave birth to a new sub-field of history usually referred to as “the new history of capitalism.” Economic history is hardly novel, but the new history of capitalism takes the approach that capitalism is the “thing” that needs to be explained. In the past decade, this field has become one of the most fashionable trends in the history profession, with centers for the study of capitalism being established at Cornell and the University of Georgia.

Predictably, the scholarship that falls under this label is replete with problems. Most self-described “historians of capitalism” know nothing of economic theory even as they try to incorporate it into their writings. Seth Rockman, from Brown University, for instance, supports his analysis of antebellum Baltimore by quoting Adam Smith’s exposition of the labor theory of value. Rockman seems to be taking a sly shot at proponents of capitalism—“even your precious Adam Smith believes labor is the source of value”—but he appears to be entirely unaware that economists abandoned the labor theory of value more than a century ago.1

These historians have also uniformly accepted that slavery and capitalism are inextricably linked. This idea has been around since at least 1944, when the Marxist historian Eric Williams published Capitalism and Slavery, arguing that British industrialization depended on the slave economy of Barbados.2 But the idea has evolved to the point that historians have established a consensus on claims that defy empirical substantiation…

But the primary issue with the new literature is that while historians have taken “capitalism” as their primary subject of inquiry, it seems nearly impossible to identify what, exactly, capitalism is. This problem is also nothing new. In 1996, historian Gordon Wood observed that “the confusion [over the term ‘capitalism’] has gotten so great that we now have competing and contradictory studies that show that the first two centuries of early American history were either capitalist from the beginning or never capitalist at all.”5 At that time, though, economic histories were on the decline. By 2008, when the “new” history of capitalism was born, the definition problems had been long forgotten (or conveniently ignored).

Now we see historians discussing capitalism in ways that suggest that “capitalism” is defined as “everything that has or has not ever happened.” Henry Kamerling, for instance, in Capital and Convict, argues that capitalism is the reason why the United States evolved into a carceral state.6 His basic argument is that politicians and prison wardens acted in their own self-interest in expanding the prison system. Self-interest, of course, is ubiquitous in human history—it’s part of human nature, despite Marx’s theory to the contrary. Although self-interest is an important concept in understanding human action, Kamerling’s analysis could easily be transposed onto a history of the Soviet Union to argue that capitalism gave rise to the communist gulag.

Sven Beckert, in his highly praised Empire of Cotton, takes another expansive approach to defining capitalism. Coining the provocative term “war capitalism,” Beckert writes that “modern capitalism privileges property rights, but this earlier [capitalist] moment [of colonial expansion] was characterized just as much by massive expropriations as by secure ownership.”7 If capitalism is both the protection and violation of private property, then what is not capitalism?…

Proper study of economics, of course, makes important distinctions between various types of state interventions. The lack of intervention into the economy is generally recognized as laissez-faire capitalism. Correctly or not, historians typically attribute this economic view to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which was written in response to mercantilism—the practice of governments granting monopoly privileges to companies engaged in international exchange. Corporatism, of course, is a similar form of privilege granted domestically.

Other interventions, such as taxation and regulation, hamper private companies. In some cases, the government nationalizes an industry entirely, as is common with education systems. By controlling the money supply, governments also interfere with the credit institutions, manipulating the available supply of loanable funds.

Each of these categories of intervention has distinct and important causal implications, which is why economist—even when employing problematic methods of inquiry, such as econometrics—have long tried to find ways to isolate the many dynamic variables that affect economic development. Ideally, historians should do the same, making attempts to isolate historical particularities to study how specific variables influenced historical change. Instead, historians have more commonly begun to adopt equivocal labels designed to homogenize, rather than isolate, these particularities…

The true aim of these “scholar activists,” as many academics have begun calling themselves, is to propagate socialism by redefining capitalism to encompass every evil of human history. They typically avoid advocating any specific economic system at all. They only want people to think about “alternatives to capitalism.” But with their broad, and often contradictory, conception of capitalism, it is easy to recognize the “alternative” they have in mind.

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