Why Not Capitalism?
"Are you interested in capitalism as a path to your personal utopia? This stirring moral defense of a free society is the place to start."—Tyler Cowen, George Mason University"In forceful strokes, Jason Brennan attacks the work of the late G.A. Cohen's defense of socialism and neatly shows why and how it is not the best of all systems even in the best of all possible worlds, let alone the highly imperfect world in which we live. His combination of accessible prose with technical precision is a model of good writing on political theory that should enable this book to reach the wider audience it deserves."—Richard Epstein, New York University School of Law"Gone is the false triumphalism of the 1990s. The question of how to organize society, and the ideological conflict between market systems and socialist systems, is live. Brennan offers in this brief volume a fully realized and compelling answer to Jerry Cohen's rightly celebrated bookWhy Not Socialism?Many of the responses to socialist advocacy dismiss command economies as impractical or impossible. But Brennan grants Cohen his premises, and carries out the argument in a way that faithfully mirrors the logic that Cohen tried to marshall in his defense of socialism. Brennan offers an unflinching defense of capitalism, and does it with style and humor. His writing is at once accessible to the first-time philosopher and yet persuasive to the denizens of the ivory towers. This book will be on the reading list for every class I teach."—Michael Munger, Director of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, Duke University