Adam Smith in His Time and Ours Review

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(More customer reviews)I couldn't disagree more with the review of Max Hayes. It would and does shock people to learn that Adam Smith wasn't primarily an economist as we think of the term. The fact that his work was centered around moral philosophy and making people "decent" is widely unknown and most people have never even heard of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Robert Heilbroner said it best when he called Smith "the most quoted and least read of the worldly philophers."
This book is not a biography of Smith, which would probably be pretty boring. It is an examination of his ideas. Muller starts by placing the book in its intellectual context of earlier traditions. Than he turns to an examination of Smith's work as a whole. This is important because to often Smith is limited to The Wealth of Nations, which is only one element of his thought. Muller examines The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Lectures on Jurisprudence to form a more complete picture of Smith as a moral philisopher.
The most important element of this book is the demonstration that Smith was not a defender of unrestrained greed. Smith sought to defend and construct institutions that would channel individual self-interest into benefical results for the whole of society. Nor was he an enemy of government. While it is true that he thought government often proved a danger to the market because of the influence of what we call special interests, Smith did not reject government regulation totally. In fact he argued for regulation of banking and interest rates and advocated using the government to try and correct the negative effects capitalism had on the intellect of the people through public financed education.
Muller writes a compelling book demonstrating that Smith is not the proto-libertarian so many people claim. That in fact Smith would probably be quite dismayed at the uses to which his thoughts have been applied.

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Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique Review

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(More customer reviews)"Marx for Our Times" by Daniel Bensaid is a scholarly and timely defense of Karl Marx, who remains the preeminent critic of capitalism. Mr. Bensaid leads us on an intellectually stimulating journey where we understand how Marx's thought is principally a "critical theory of social struggle" whose scientific methodology is replete with chaos theory and contingency. That the spectre of really non-existing socialism has allowed an unalloyed Marx to inspire a new generation of anti-globalization protesters and thinkers proves the durability and ongoing relevance of Marx's writings.

The book is divided into three sections. The first is on the topic of historical reason. Marx was opposed to capital's tendency to use its wealth to create systems characterized by domination and dependency. Marx offered a hopeful and alternative vision of how people might channel their material progress towards the liberation of human potential. Therefore, the historical determinism suggested in "The Communist Manifesto" is but one possible outcome that might result from class struggle. However, it is true that capital frequently shapes history through crises that are usually resolved by political struggle and occassionaly lead to revolutionary change.

The second section focuses on class struggle. Mr. Bensaid cites a number of theorists who have recently sought to wrap Marx into neoliberal market theory, where the invisible hand of the market might result in a just distribution of resources. The author responds to these critics by pointing out that Marx attempted to transcend the struggle between labor and capital (rather than settling for distributive justice, which was an emerging idea in Marx's lifetime). Marx believed that theories of justice and the critique of political economy were irreconcilable; equality would prove elusive as long as the working class was dedicated to producing the surplus value that sustained elitist privilege. Rather, Marx advocated a program of working-class empowerment where the people might administer their own affairs and thereby allow the state to wither away.

Section three discusses Marx's approach to the sciences. Mr. Bensaid writes that Marx and his contemporary Charles Darwin stressed instability, disequilibrium and tendential laws that represented a radical upheaval in the scientific thought of the day. In marked contrast with reductionist Newtonian science, Marx and Darwin reveled in chaos bound within systems that could be defined but whose outcomes were not always known. Understanding that quantity is a measure of qualitative processes, Marx criticized the economists of his day for their reductionism by only seeking to measure that which has already been inputed into the capitalist system; by ignoring so-called "externalities" such as ecological and human costs, Marx reminds us that the abstract measure of labor as money produces a system that is incapable of harmonizing humanity with nature. This insight in turn suggests, in the author's powerful concluding chapter, how an environmentally prophetic Marx could be essential to helping us secure a more humane, democratic and environmentally sustainable future.

In today's world where global market irrationalities are leading us towards disaster, Mr. Bensaid is to be commended for solidly reconnecting Marx with contemporary issues and providing insight into how we might do better.


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Reveals the 'post-modern Marx' to show that this nineteenth-century thinker is relevant to the twenty-first century of global capitalism.

The end of Soviet Socialism signaled to some observers that the ghost of Marx had finally been laid to rest. But history's refusal to grind to a halt and the global credit crisis that began in 2008 have rekindled interest in capitalism's most persistent critic.

Written during the mid-nineties, a period of Western complacency and neo-liberal reaction, Marx for Our Times is a critical reading of dialectical materialism as a method of resistance. Without denying the contradictory character of Marx's thought, and with a sensitivity to the plurality of theories it has inspired, Daniel Bensaid sets out to discover what in Marx remains dynamic and relevant in our era of accelerating economic change.

Marx's theory emerges, not as a doctrinal system, but as an intellectual tool of social struggle and global transformation in a world where capital continues to dominate social relations.

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