Andrew Levine

Book ReviewsDavid Schweickart, .After Capitalism.Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Pp. 224.

In the preface to this remarkable book, David Schweickart proclaims himself a hedgehog who, as Isaiah Berlin put it, “knows one big thing” (Russian Thinkers [New York: Penguin, 1978], 22). In fact, he is also a fox who knows many things in both philosophy and economics. But the one big thing Schweickart knows, the institutional structure of postcapitalist economies, is literally of world historical importance. Nowadays, this has become a nontopic in academic circles where it is assumed that, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative” (TINA). Thatcher meant that there is no alternative to the neoliberal version of capitalism she and her American cothinkers promoted. Fortunately, that view is already in retreat, even as it remains entrenched in ruling circles in Washington and London. But TINA thinking, the idea that there is no (ethically defensible and/or economically feasible) alternative to capitalism, is still the conventional wisdom. Schweickart knows better. In 1980, he published a book, Capitalism or Worker Control? An Ethical and Economic Appraisal (New York: Praeger, 1980), which deserved far more attention than it received, and in which he set out the case for a democratic form of socialism. Then in 1993, after Communism’s demise and in light of a decade’s worth of developments in political philosophy and economic theory, he returned to “economic democracy,” as he now calls it, in a new book, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). There, addressing mainly professional philosophers and economists, Schweickart further elaborated his account of the economic system he defended years earlier. Despite the cogency of its arguments, this second book also received scant attention. It therefore failed to move the “conversation,” as we now call it, away from the TINA thesis, which was, by then already generally assumed. This latest effort is aimed both at professionals and at a general audience. But it is emphatically not a “dumbed down” version of what Schweickart has already published. Quite the contrary; it represents the results of yet another decade’s worth of sustained reflection. By now, Schweickart’s account is so well honed that he is able to present his case with magisterial clarity and without mathematical pyrotechnics. One hopes that, at last, Schweickart’s one big idea will attract a wide enough audience to become a significant presence in the mainstream political and academic culture. Should this happen, only the willfully blind will still be able to endorse Richard Rorty’s TINA-ish contention that we should “stop using the term ‘capitalist economy’ as if we knew what a functioning noncapitalist economy looked like” (quoted on xiv). In this book, Schweickart does many things, some of which will stand as invaluable contributions if and when TINA thinking subsides and the socialism versus capitalism debate resumes. Among other things, his accounts of noncom-