A gangster called Capitalism and its vanquisher The Common Good

Once upon a time, a powerful unkillable beast menaced the nation. It had to be tamed. It could only be tamed by a robust ethos of the common good. This gradually emerged: a new democratic spirit was born! But soon critics popped up, complaining about aspects of the new order, calling it stifling, limiting, pompous and dated. They gained power: the fools uncaged the beast! For three decades it has trampled all over public life, declaring the profit motive to be the only realism; it has unbalanced industry, empowered reckless bankers, and forced public services to dance to its commercial tunes; it has utterly subverted the left, which dared not challenge it, but rather trusted that it would bring universal benefits. It didn’t: it brought rising insecurity, and hideous new levels of inequality, and environmental doom. Worst of all, the beast has got inside our heads, so that the idea of re-taming it strikes us as sentimental naivety.

David Marquand tells this story well. His polemic is calm, considered, yet impassioned, as that comma in the subtitle suggests. Unlike the average Guardian columnist, he avoids self-righteous rhetoric, and honestly reflects on the lack of easy answers. He has written a stimulating sketch of political ideas, which provides a good insight into the battered, near-despairing state of the intelligent left. Shouldn’t the left be confident these days, with capitalism’s claim to deliver general wellbeing looking shakier than ever? Ironically, this only magnifies the weakness of the left: its opponent stumbles and leaves an open goal, but it still can’t score.

He starts with the Victorians. As Trollope’s Melmotte and Dickens’s Merdle show, gangster capitalism was rife. But thinkers including Carlyle, Mill and Ruskin were clear: greed is the exact opposite of good. This public moralism was developed in the next century by Tawney, Temple, Keynes and Reith.