Capitalism Without Horns

For nearly three generations the economic and business histories of England and America have been written by anti-capitalist zealots. Our accounts of the Industrial Revolution and its sequel have come down to us from Marx and Engels, the Webbs and the Hammonds. They present a picture of labor exploitation, of increasing poverty and misery, of women and children working under appalling conditions in mines and factories. Our accounts of American business since the Civil War have come from the muckraking works of Ida Tarbell and Gustavus Myers, popularized and summarized in Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons.

We have had to wait until the last two decades for a more balanced view. In Capitalism and the Historians (1954), F. A. Hayek, T. S. Ashton, and W. H. Hutt pointed out that though conditions in the Industrial Revolution were deplorable in the light of our present working and living standards, it was precisely the Industrial Revolution that made our present working and living standards possible. It was a period of unprecedented expansion, of rising wages and falling prices, of increased longevity and startling increase of pop-

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About the Author

Henry Hazlitt

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For nearly three generations the economic and business histories of England and America have been written by anti-capitalist zealots. Our accounts of the Industrial Revolution and its sequel have come down to us from Marx and Engels, the Webbs and the Hammonds. They present a picture of labor exploitation, of increasing poverty and misery, of women and children working under appalling conditions in mines and factories. Our accounts of American business since the Civil War have come from the muckraking works of Ida Tarbell and Gustavus Myers, popularized and summarized in Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons.

We have had to wait until the last two decades for a more balanced view. In Capitalism and the Historians (1954), F. A. Hayek, T. S. Ashton, and W. H. Hutt pointed out that though conditions in the Industrial Revolution were deplorable in the light of our present working and living standards, it was precisely the Industrial Revolution that made our present working and living standards possible. It was a period of unprecedented expansion, of rising wages and falling prices, of increased longevity and startling increase of pop-