The world has entered an era of autopsies and prophecies. According to many scholars and commentators, the order that the United States presided over after the end of the Cold War is dead. After the Soviet Union imploded, many assumed that the defeat of communism would augur the ineluctable spread of both capitalism and democracy—all stewarded by the United States. But it is now liberal democracy that finds itself in crisis, with democratic backsliding common around the globe, public mistrust of liberal institutions on the rise, and growing doubt about the wisdom of free trade and open markets. The convulsed domestic politics and foreign policy of the United States have thrown this crisis into stark relief. In his now famous speech at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered a valediction for the U.S.-led order and urged others to accept its passing without mourning or nostalgia.

What comes next after this “rupture,” to use the prime minister’s phrasing, is the subject of great debate. On the right in Western countries, the rupture is considered a restoration, an opportunity to make capitalism great again by reversing generations of the cosmopolitan embrace of free markets. Critics on the left worry that states are seizing control of markets not in service of stronger social safety nets and protections for the vulnerable, but to elevate and entrench a new oligarchy of tech elites. Lamentations abound. Market fundamentalists bemoan the return of tariffs, soaring public debt, and what they consider excessive regulation. Centrist liberals survey the turbulence and see the end of the Enlightenment altogether, with its commitments to reason, moderation, and cooperative self-interest.

A rough consensus emerges from these swirling narratives. Liberalism, the political and philosophical system once seen as capitalism’s cornerstone, is spent. Proponents of liberalism championed the belief in personal autonomy and the unobstructed right to property, ideas that supported the opening of markets and underpinned modern gospels of free trade. The nineteenth-century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, for instance, insisted that a healthy economic system rested on distributed property rights and access to market exchange. And yet such systems in the current age have produced glaring inequality and strong concentrations of personal wealth and state power.

A postliberal world now awaits, one in which a capitalism shorn of its liberal qualities may predominate. The alliance of democracy and capitalism, born in the wake of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and the widening suffrage of the nineteenth century, may simply have been one chapter in a grander epic, a phase that conjured the illusion that people had to be free for societies to prosper. After all, before its liberal phase, capitalist societies often depended on slave labor and colonial monopolies. This gloomy consensus holds that now, in its postliberal phase, capitalism may just be returning to some version of its past. The impression that China can thrive unconstrained by the niceties of pluralism and debate helps seal this conclusion.

In Capitalism: A Global History, the acclaimed Harvard historian Sven Beckert offers a narrative for these times. He insists that capitalism, the world’s now universal economic system, does not depend on liberalism. Anchored in the defense of private property and the imperative of profit seeking, capitalism has deep roots in a pre-liberal age and can thrive when freed from normative commitments to liberal values. In Beckert’s view, capitalism relied less on individual freedom than on coalitions of moneyed men and muscular states. Even as the dysphoria about free trade and unregulated markets deepens, countries appear to be turning back the clock to a more unvarnished age, marked by exploitation and the ruthless pursuit of profit. In that light, perhaps it’s not surprising that a 2025 Gallup poll found that only 54 percent of Americans have a positive view of capitalism, the lowest level since Gallup began tracking such attitudes in 2010.

And yet these dark prophecies obscure what has made capitalism distinctive compared with its predecessors and its alternatives. Capitalist societies have had an uncanny ability to translate tensions and resistance into renovation. That was especially the case in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when liberal political systems allowed for contestation and debate that prompted the adjustments that helped reinvent economic systems. Each time observers predicted its end—beginning with the sages of the apocalypse, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—capitalism rebounded anew. Its pluralist forces found ways not just to survive but to take production and distribution to new levels. And even now, as so many take a dim view of the direction of capitalism, that past holds out the possibility of meaningful and positive renewal.

THE MERCHANT AND THE STATE

Beckert is best known for his award-​winning 2014 book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, an epic account of the cotton industry and its shaping........

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