Thomas Heilbroner s Twenty First Century Capitalism

Trying to understand the world that we live in today and where we are going in the future, as a nation, as a modern society, and as humans in general, we must look at the overarching structure or social order that created our present condition, capitalism. In order to understand capitalism, we must not only try to understand what capitalism really is, but realize that it is not solely composed of what is commonly connected with the term, economics. Rather, it is composed of varying social and political factors that make capitalism what it truly is. This view and analysis of capitalism is what Robert Heilbroner puts forth in his 1992 book, Twenty-First Century Capitalism, where he introduces the notion of the two realms of†¦show more content†¦4). And the way that these capitalist countries achieve this is through the organizing principle of capitalism, the market. That said, in the long history of societies, the market is a relatively new organizing principle, and it needed certain conditions to take hold. This was precipitated by the fall of the Roman Empire which was â€Å"crucial not only because the social order of the Empire was at every level incompatible with a capitalist order, but because its shattered ruins provided an extraordinary setting in which such an order would emerge—slowly, painfully, and without any sense of fulfilling a historic mission during the thousand-year period we call feudalism† (Ibid., p. 33). And although this millennium of history is much more complex than can be described here, basically the fall of the Roman Empire left Europe â€Å"without unifying law, currency, and government, broken into a crazy quilt of isolate and self-dependent towns, manorial estates, and petty fiefdoms† (Ibid., p. 34). And it was this very fragmentation of feudal life that made it possible for the transformation into a