Jr., Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies

Purcell examines how capitalism and risk have been conceptualized in American political and economic discourse, particularly from the late twentieth century onward. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and subsequent structural changes in the American economy, fervent commitments to capitalist ideology intensified alongside anxieties about economic risks posed by industrial development and globalization. Purcell notes that recent decades of economic performance have revealed many capitalist risk-management claims to be overblown or misleading. He argues for reviewing fundamental economic concepts by examining historical evidence. Capitalism itself defies simple definition—Max Weber identified it as an evolutionary economic process, while Joseph Schumpeter viewed it as dynamic method. The article traces capitalism's varied historical forms, including the slave economy of the antebellum American South, which operated with capitalist values (profit-seeking, contracts, private property, wage labor, and competitive markets) despite being dismissed as anti-capitalist. The cotton market created elaborate financial networks connecting Mississippi and Louisiana to Manchester and Liverpool. Purcell challenges Milton Friedman's equation of capitalism with democracy, demonstrating through historical analysis that capitalist forms have supported authoritarian regimes and that some capitalist societies readily abandoned democratic principles. German capitalism's complicity with Nazism and twentieth-century state capitalisms further illustrate capitalism's ideological flexibility.

Topics: Legal Theory · Legal History · Constitutional Law

Keywords: capitalism · risk management · economic history · slavery · private property · competitive markets · Milton Friedman · state capitalism