Description: "Muller's volume is comprehensive, lucidly analytical, and splendidly admirably objective. I could not imagine a more useful or well-proportioned a reference-overview for any student of modern economic history." --Howard Sachar, author of A History of Israel and Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War "What a brilliant idea, to visit some of the most interesting and insightful Western thinkers in regard to a central theme! The theme suggests the selection; the selection illuminates the theme. The focus on subject rather than names ensures that we shall not be prisoners of overall reputation, victims of great minds unfamiliar with economics, ignorant of capitalism, but of emphatic opinion. Reading this book is an exercise in comparison and continual rethinking. Thanks to Muller's sensitive and critical guidance, we come away knowing the subject far better than would otherwise be possible." ---David S. Landes, Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Harvard University "This book is a magisterial contribution to the history of ideas. Muller succeeds in bringing to life two centuries of the encounter between Western thought and the phenomenon of capitalism, and he does so both eloquently and eruditely. At one point he refers to Matthew Arnold's 'ideal of the disinterested intellectual willing to criticize one side and then the other in order to create balance and counteract the one-sidedness that led toward fanaticism.' In this, as in other works of his, Muller himself impressively realizes Arnold's ideal. ---Peter L. Berger, Institute for the Study of Economic Culture

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