Liberalism and Capitalism Today

Introduction

When you have a book on capitalism and liberalism in your hands, most of the time, you find yourself faced with a debate based either on a panegyric praising the benefits of these two systems or on a purely critical ideology and hackneyed arguments that have been heard many times. Our objective is different: first, we will show how these systems appeared historically, then examine their evolution over time up to the present day, both in terms of their advantages and their dysfunctions.

Indeed, we can only understand the present by drawing on the past. However, we know that the explanations concerning the circumstances in which liberalism and capitalism emerged and developed are numerous and the object of these interpretations is often contradictory. The choice made in this book was not to present, compare and contrast all these analyses. It is obviously subjectable to criticism and will be criticized because it is based on numerous demonstrations. It seemed interesting to us to refer to causes, mostly economic, but also historical, political, legal and sociological causes.

For this, we have essentially called upon two authors recognized in all these fields: first, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville¹, followed by someone who is considered his successor, the Austrian Max Weber². These forerunners of sociology, as well as historians and politicians, used this nascent science to explain the history of humanity and, thus, also of liberalism and capitalism. Moreover, ...