Review: "Unleashed Capitalism" — The Logic of Capital Without Leash
Notes on the critique of neoliberalism from a perspective that doesn't take capitalism's current form as natural or inevitable.
The title is a translation of Le capitalisme sans gêne — capitalism without embarrassment, without the constraints that once kept it from pursuing its own logic to its natural conclusion.
The book argues that what we call "globalization" is not a natural phenomenon but a political project — the deliberate removal of the regulatory frameworks, labor protections, and capital controls that postwar societies built to govern market behavior.
The Core Argument
Markets don't naturally self-regulate. The postwar settlement embedded markets within social and political structures designed to manage their destructive tendencies: progressive taxation, collective bargaining, social insurance, financial regulation. These weren't inefficiencies — they were load-bearing walls.
When those walls were removed starting in the 1970s and 1980s, capital became genuinely free for the first time since the Depression. The result was not the efficient paradise predicted by theory. It was rising inequality, financial instability, and the gradual erosion of the political and social institutions that had made democratic capitalism functional.
What Strikes Me
Reading this as a college student, the concept that felt most important was the idea that economic arrangements are political choices, not natural facts.
We treat "the market" as something that exists outside of human decisions. But every market is built on a scaffold of laws, enforcement mechanisms, property rights, and political choices about which transactions to permit and which to prohibit. "Deregulation" is not the absence of rules — it's a different set of rules, usually ones that favor capital over labor.
The Limits
The critique doesn't fully grapple with the productivity gains that liberalization produced, or with the genuine difficulty of rebuilding regulatory frameworks in an era of capital mobility. Saying the old settlement should be restored is easier than saying what the new one should look like.
But as a starting point — as a corrective to the idea that the current arrangement is the only possible one — it still does useful work.