Capitalism, as Told by Its Enemies

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is widely known as a reputable and accessible compendium of articles on complex scholarly subjects, offered free of charge to the public since 1995. Think of it as Wikipedia for philosophy, but with authors who are known experts in their subjects and peer review to maintain quality control.

That quality control broke down last week when the SEP published a new entry for “capitalism,” its first-ever foray into the subject. The concept of “capitalism” is an admittedly complex topic, and one might reasonably expect that an encyclopedia article on it would include not only its theoretical underpinnings dating back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but also its critics such as Karl Marx.

Instead of attempting some semblance of balance, the new SEP entry author Chiara Cordelli, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, used this platform to air her own personal grievances with capitalism as an economic system. The resulting product gives scant attention to proponents of free-market economics. By contrast, Cordelli’s article is loaded with content from the Marxist or socialist far left. Space devoted to critics of capitalism far outpaces even basic descriptions of the economic concept, and proponents of capitalism are reduced to shallow parodies.

In an era when academia is under fire for a well-documented leftward ideological shift as well as declining standards of scholarly rigor, the publication of an encyclopedia entry with a pronounced anti-capitalism skew only confirms the public’s declining trust in our university system. Rather than serving as a curator and disseminator of knowledge, higher education has become an institutional home for a single specific brand of ideological activism.

Improper emphasis.

The new “capitalism” encyclopedia entry illustrates how higher education’s leftward ideological ecosystem erodes basic quality checks on published research. In an attempt to quantify just how critical of capitalism the author was, we researched the political perspectives of each of the 169 authors cited in the entry’s bibliography and recommended readings list. The results showed an overwhelming anti-capitalist skew: Over half of the sources listed in the capitalism entry’s bibliography were overtly hostile or critical of capitalism, and just 8 percent were supportive.

As a point of comparison, we repeated this exercise for the SEP’s “socialism” article (first published in 2018 and updated in 2024) to see how it compares against Cordelli’s new entry. The difference was striking. Of the 160 authors cited in the socialism article, only two were overtly critical of socialism and nearly two-thirds were supportive.

The ideological imbalance of both entries became even more apparent when we dug deeper into the philosophical perspectives that are given airtime in Cordelli’s article. Of the 93 cited authors we were able to sort into specific ideological camps, Marxist perspectives—such as orthodox Marxism, critical theory, and analytical Marxism—far outnumbered any other group. In addition to the Marxists, Cordelli’s entry gives ample space to a stream of non-Marxian socialist and anti-capitalist thinkers such as the sociological historian Karl Polanyi, the far-left economist Thomas Piketty, and self-citations to Cordelli’s own writings in the “democratic socialist” tradition.

Compare that to Cordelli’s citations of free-market classical liberal authors in the tradition of Adam Smith—just four are mentioned. Adjacent thinkers from libertarian or pro-capitalist traditions, such as Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand, add only a handful of additional references.

Cordelli’s prose functions as an anti-capitalist advocacy piece rather than a neutral and descriptive encyclopedia entry. It breaks with the normal format of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which a concept or a philosopher’s work is usually described in its component parts to give a better view of the whole. While other entries usually offer space for debate and criticisms of the author or subject, they seldom comprise the majority of their verbiage.

Cordelli’s barrage of critiques against capitalism is almost twice as long as her description of capitalism’s supporters. Marxist accounts of capitalism account for three times the combined word count of Cordelli’s descriptions of market capitalism and institutionalist theories of capitalism. The author was clearly more concerned with highlighting every minute facet of anti-capitalist academic writing imaginable than with helping readers understand what the concept means, or the reasons that people defend it.

The resulting product is even more egregious when one considers the track records of these competing perspectives. Whatever criticisms may be offered of capitalism, its underlying economic theories have coincided with an unparalleled rise in prosperity and well-being between the late 18th century and today, often known as the Great Enrichment. By comparison, the Marxist perspectives that dominate Cordelli’s work carry the ignominious baggage of mass atrocity and economic ruin in the 20th century, though the phrase “Soviet Union” never appears in her entry. Neither do any of its catastrophic copycat regimes, from Maoist China to recent socialist experiments in Venezuela. Economists of any non-Marxian or socialist stripe are relegated to a minimal presence, and where their ideas are discussed at all, a socialist or anti-capitalist critic is almost always brought in at the end and given the last word.

The bizarre result is something akin to an encyclopedia entry about “astronomy” in which the majority of consulted sources are astrologers, and furthermore their horoscope readings are privileged over the empirical calculations of actual scientists who study star movements.

Factual errors.

The imbalanced ideological emphasis of the entry should be readily apparent to a neutral reader, but anyone familiar with the study of capitalism or economics would also notice how Cordelli warps the details of her subject matter to fit an ideological agenda.

Almost all the sources used to defend free markets are given superficial treatment, and even those superficial references tend to be wrong. She gives short shrift to economist Friedrich Hayek’s work, yet manages to misrepresent those positions that she does discuss, such as when she depicts him as a theorist of equilibrium instead of as a theorist of coordination and information, which are distinct and often contradictory approaches. Hayek’s work focuses on how prices act as signals of changes in the relative scarcity of goods over time and coordinate how people respond to changes in supply and demand. General equilibrium theory deals with statics (like optimizing resource allocation or production decisions with a starting set of resources, preferences, and production capabilities), and Hayek’s work deals with dynamic changes over time. They are very different approaches to understanding how prices function and could not easily be confused by someone who understands economics.

In an illustrative thread on X, Ben Golub, a professor of economics at Northwestern University, identified a number of other basic factual errors in the entry, such as the author’s claim that Hayek and Milton Friedman believed that, for capitalism to exist, “there must be complete, private, and unregulated markets for all ‘factors of production,’ including capital and labor,” despite both making allowances for regulation and market rules. Cordelli also conflated two different papers, published decades apart, by Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase and even misrepresented details of Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen’s position on Marx. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History is a defense of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, not an exploitation-based critique of capitalism, which is what Cordelli cited him for.

Cordelli also opens the first section of her entry with Marx’s definition of capitalism and makes reference to the “labor theory of value” without acknowledging that this concept has been considered obsolete by mainstream economists since the 1870s. Yet Cordelli proceeds as if Marx’s economic theories remain intact, ultimately devoting some 800 words spread across two different sections of the entry to exegesis on “surplus value.” That’s more verbiage on a single debunked Marxian concept than she provides to the entirety of Friedman’s work. This is a philosophical equivalent of treating geocentrism or flat-earth theory as valid and useful ideas.

What the entry could have been.

A more balanced entry on capitalism for the SEP could have offered a constructive assessment of this subject, its history, and the contemporary state of scholarship around it. Such an entry could still have room for critics in the Marxist and many other socialist traditions, but they would not have the disproportionate dominance found in Cordelli’s piece. Instead, a better entry might include serious engagement with the Scottish Enlightenment precursors to the emergence of market capitalism in the late 18th century, with references to David Hume’s work on trade and currency, as well as something more than superficial references to Adam Smith.

It might also discuss how the ideas we call “capitalism” came to supplant an older mercantilist economic order that used government policies to steer an economy for nationalistic objectives. It might also discuss the period of both political and philosophical contestation between the “capitalist” and “Marxian communist” worlds following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and culminating in the collapse of the latter in 1991. It could discuss in greater depth the theoretical contributions of institutionalist economists like Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North in the mid-20th century around the theory of a market economy. It might mention Deirdre McCloskey’s work on the Great Enrichment as a positive argument for what we colloquially refer to as capitalism. And it might explore the tensions between these and other theorists of market capitalism. As it stands, this rich and complex academic literature receives nary a mention beyond a few passing citations.

Since capitalism is fundamentally an economic concept, one could reasonably expect to see mainstream economic voices discussed, and competently so, by someone versed in economic theory. There would be a clear description of how profits work both as signals of demand and incentives for entrepreneurship, how competition between firms disciplines market actors, how market prices make economic calculation possible by signaling the relative scarcity of goods in a common denominator, and how government policies contribute to the creation of monopolies. Marxist and socialist critiques of capitalism from the far left would also be balanced with mainstream economic critiques of socialism. Early in the 20th century, there was famously a debate among economists over whether socialist central planners were capable of engaging in economic calculation. The economists who argued against the possibility of socialist calculation ultimately won the debate—though one would not know this from reading Cordelli’s entry.

Welfarist arguments for capitalism would not be confined to a single paragraph, and would describe in detail how free-market capitalism has been responsible for lifting the world out of poverty. The way that capitalism incentivizes entrepreneurship, and the role entrepreneurs play in arbitrage and the creation of new goods and services, would play a more important role than the entry’s single paragraph on Joseph Schumpeter, the first economist to make entrepreneurship central to the understanding of economic development and change.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s unwillingness to select an author for the entry on capitalism who could provide a charitable or even neutral assessment of the concept is ultimately unscholarly. In the 20th century, socialism resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people, and capitalism and free markets were the critical factors for lifting billions out of poverty, and yet it is socialism that received the positive encyclopedia entry and capitalism that garnered the hate. Such imbalances could only emerge from an academic environment in which an ideological echo chamber supplants rigorous peer review, and the fashionable socialist perspectives of the professoriate lead it to mistake bad caricatures of a market economy for descriptive fact.