A review of: A Tale of Four Cities: From the Invisible Hand to Cancel Culture
by Phil Duffy
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Minor Issues Podcast. I’m Mark Thornton at the Mises Institute.
I am the book review editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The QJAE is the academic economic journal published by the Mises Institute. Some listeners may wonder why I have never reviewed a book on this podcast, even though I very often speak of various books and academic publications.
Well, book reviews typically don’t fit nicely into the mission of this podcast which is to bring current issues under the microscope of Austrian economics. We also bring attention to issues that are NOT in the mainstream media or academia that Austrian economists consider important.
However, today I am going to review a new book. It’s a book that is almost entirely about history. However, the book’s purpose and message, as I see it, is about addressing and unraveling the burning issues of today. And moreover, it addresses them with powerful insights based in part on Austrian economics. I am sure that my audience will appreciate reading the commentary quoted from Austrian economists, Old Right writers, and the sage advice of History concerning important issues, instead of the various minions of the state!
The book is titled A Tale of Four Cities: From Invisible Hand to Cancel Culture. The author is Philip Duffy.
I’m going to try to avoid telling the author’s story, but just for your curiosity, the four cities from the title are Paris, London, Rome, and Munich, in that historical order. That provides some clues.
Of special interest to me is the central character of the book. Having written extensively about him, I usually preface my public lectures on this person by noting that he is probably the smartest, most mysterious, wealthiest, and most socially-relevant person in the history of the world that no one in the audience has ever heard of. His name is Richard Cantillon and he lived throughout Europe in the late 1600s to 1734 when he was murdered, faked his death, or possibly was assassinated.
You might not be able to recall much of your learning about the Enlightenment period, but you will see that Cantillon was a very important player in the events of that period. He interacted with all the important players back then including Issac Newton and Montesquieu. At one point, he even worked for the infamous John Law!
Cantillon was the person who discovered the principles of the market economy and especially of what’s called entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are responsible for the dramatic upward swing in the standard of living in the West over the last three centuries or so. Entrepreneurs include many of the famous industrial titans and inventors, while most of their names are lost to history, and of course they are ubiquitous around us—giving us jobs, goods, and services.
My own research has conclusively shown that Cantillon is the sole discoverer of what we call economic theory, which is, to the social world, what Isaac Newton’s Laws of motion and gravity were to the physical world.
Ironically, but all-too-correctly, Duffy attributes many of the faults and failures of the West to the celebrated Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith. In Smith’s own very famous book, The Wealth of Nations, Smith did copycat some of the beauties of the free society that he gleaned from Cantillon’s own book and some from his own Scottish teachers, but he mostly bungled beyond repair some of the most important scientific contributions of Cantillon, especially the crucial point of entrepreneurship, which Smith failed to even bother to include.
For example, nowhere in Smith’s famous, although plagiarized, pin factory example is there an entrepreneur or owner/boss. The workers apparently just decide to divide the work up between various stages on their own without any direction. Duffy shows that Smith’s utter neglect of the central point connecting the entrepreneur and prosperity haunts us to this day, to the delight of Karl Marx and his clueless band of followers.
Adam Smith’s failures and personal biases have continued to have an ever-widening negative effect on our society because he was so widely read and accepted. Duffy provides the reader with a concise and relevant history of economic thought which is guided by the insights of Austrian economist Murray Rothbard and many others. The author then shows how Adam Smith’s original errors continue to infect social thought, including many of the negative currents in modern society over the last century or so.
In contrast to Smith and his labor-centric attitudes, Cantillon’s hero-class of modern society is entrepreneurs, and we all act entrepreneurial and at risk to some extent, except for bureaucrats. Even Karl Marx referred to them as an important class of people—the bourgeoisie—who were necessary to bring society to a high state of economic development. Marx realized how important they were!
The reality is that this class has been the risk-bearers and organizers of society—they hire people, write paychecks, make sure goods are on the shelves, they do the work, and take the risks. Entrepreneurs are also capitalists because they necessarily have skin in the game.
Typically, this group gets a remarkably small slice of the economic pie, even though they buy all the ingredients, make sure the pie gets baked correctly, and make sure everyone gets a slice. They get all the scorn for society’s ills, much to the delight of today’s socialist politicians. This scornful, envious attitude goes all the way back to the Greek philosophers and it’s still true today.
If Cantillon’s book had been widely read, that numbskull attitude could have been broken. The book could not escape censure during his lifetime and was only published anonymously 25 years after his death.
Thus, armed with a good understanding of the history of ideas, the reader will also learn about the history of financial bubbles, the important political revolutions in modern times, along with an understanding of the terribly mutated ideologies, such as Marxism, Italian Fascism, American Progressivism, and German Nazism.
The book is packed with references supporting the text. It also has a thorough index. Indeed, unlike many other writers, the author encourages you to take your own personal detours (with links supplied) to brush up on and become informed on various supporting topics.
If you feel like you are reasonably well-educated and reasonably well-informed and yet you are increasingly puzzled and frustrated about the status and direction of our nation, society, and world, then this would be the one book that I would recommend you read.
The book is not yet available on Amazon, but I have provided links to other booksellers of the Epub version of the book.
This has been another episode of the Minor Issues podcast.
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