Well, can you please point out what this baleful inheritance is, and in particular what these outcomes are? Then we can make up our minds whether these outcomes and the baleful inheritance are better or worse than those outcomes and the baleful inheritance of face-to-face exchanges.

Marx, you remember, never sent letters to Kim Jong Il.

Marx and Engel did however, in The Communist Manifesto, advocate, inter-alia:

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
…
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

These strike me as ample justification for government control over the labour force – after all armies in Marx's time relied greatly on conscription. And the centralisation of the means of communication in the hand of the state – what a receipe for censorship!

I know people in France don't talk about these writers–they barely ever did. But my criticism of Wilkinson's approach is that it severs capitalism from a set of historical realities that are embarrassing for free marketers to consider. There's nothing particularly French about my observation. In this article and others posted at this site he presents a caricature of Klein's argument in order to dispense with it more effectively. This would not be allowed in a freshman class on composition, much less be tolerated from a public thinker. Wilkinson seems genuinely baffled by her accusations when, in actuality, Friedman had been dealing with these questions since the time he advised the Pinochet regime. They are not new. What is new is the way Klein assembles her particular narrative.

Now, what I find telling is, whether or not you believe The Shock Doctrine, Wilkinson, in his essay on human nature, dramatically links Marx to the domination of totalitarian regimes (as if Marx had been there to advise them), while the rest of his output manages to inoculate Friedman against any viral attack. One might go so far as to say that the excesses of Klein's narrative are meant to counterbalance this kind of silence. And rather than focus on ethics–essentially the heart of the matter–Wilkinson, in another study, turns the discussion to happiness. In that forty page essay, the word “history” appears a total of three times. In my book, such moves annul “the onslaught of the actual contemporary world.”

But seriously Harlan, real thought involves more than tying together some Large French Names with their respective dull jargon. That does not intellectual work make.

In France itself, people don't really talk about most of these folks anymore. Po-mo is in fact fading fast, faced with the onslaught of the actual contemporary world.

Really, back in the day I would have just eviscerated your use of Derrida and Delueze both here with a scathing feminist critique, but now we're all sooo over that.

A better use of time would be just watching Dita von Teese strip. Drop the dead po-mo and consider developing a healthier interest in burlesque.

I would argue that, even if the emergence of capitalism represents a certain human improbability (though Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” is persuasive in arguing the opposite), your approach to its emergence seeks to free it, not only from negative political consequence, but political consequence entirely. What else explains the urge to sever Milton Friedman from the terror practiced in the Southern Cone? Marx, you remember, never sent letters to Kim Jong Il. Yet, if we compare your reflections on Klein with the text of “Capitalism and Human Nature,” we come away imagining that while communism mainly produced suffering, capitalism has, in its mystical self-showing, mobilized some of our essential (politically neutral) human traits, and has caused no suffering worthy of mention. It’s like history without history.

Let me read through the text on happiness. I’ll respond via email.

“These features of human nature—that we are coalitional, hierarchical, and envious zero-sum thinkers—would seem to make liberal capitalism extremely unlikely. And it is.”

But it is possible, and so evidently not inconsistent with human nature.

“Once we appreciate the improbability and fragility of our wealth and freedom, it becomes clear just how much respect and gratitude we owe to the belief systems, social institutions, and personal virtues that allowed for the emergence of our “wider civilization”.”

If you think I was saying that capitalism is especially natural, you really need to read it again. I think it's pretty unnatural, and requires the cultivation and encouragement of a few weak natural tendencies, and the discouragement of a few strong ones. Do you disagree?

I'd suggest that if you think Derrida or Deleuze are relevant to this debate, you're reading the wrong people. Try Herb Gintis for a man of the left who takes work in recent behavioral science seriously. http://people.umass.edu/gintis/ And check out his Amazon review of the Shock Doctrine, while you're at it. Very unfriendly to free market economics, but also sees that Klein doesn't know what she's talking about. http://www.amazon.com/review/R2NEWPETGH4KPV/ref...

I'd like to see what you think of my paper on happiness. The empirical evidence is very clear that liberal capitalist democracies with high levels of wealth and economic freedom are the ones in which humans tend to flourish best. Do you suppose Klein is aware of this evidence?

A glance at “Capitalism and Human Nature” demonstrates typical moves of the Wilkinsonian mode. In a short article meant to dismiss one hundred fifty years of complex discussion, Wilkinson begins by contrasting a single line from the “Theses on Feuerbach” with a preposterous (and criminally negligent) statement from Kim Jong Il. The purpose? To argue that “Marx's theory of human nature, like Kim Jong Il's theory of pine needle tea, is a biological fantasy, and we have the corpses to prove it.” Wilkinson, by bringing together disparate information in a nearly Surrealist juxtaposition—dramatic but rationally meaningless—seeks to make claims about capitalism’s compatibility with human nature. The only problem is that his areas of focus (theories of hierarchy, evolution, territoriality and exchange) are not without their ambiguities. For each terrain he manages to cross, there are countless counterarguments—coming from figures as diverse as Pierre Clastres, Niklas Luhmann, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Derrida, Heinz von Foerster, Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Gregory Bateson, Gilles Deleuze, Wilhelm Reich, Felix Guattari, Victor Turner, etc. And this is only in the past fifty years. To cite just one example, Pierre Clastres’s studies of the Guayaki Indians in Paraguay demonstrate a political economy quite distinct from capitalist organization, one much closer to a kind of “mystical Marxism,” where accumulations of power are halted in advance via a series of complex social mechanisms (including tribal war), and in which the sharing of game—in a manner that helps cement communal relations—is dictated by an existing taboo. The Guayaki lived out this human experiment for hundreds, if not thousands of years (when Clastres lived with them in the late 1960s, they were much the same as they had been described by Jesuits in the 16th century). It would be pathological to say their way of life was not “natural.”

Wilkinson however does make liberal use of philosophers in the course of his argument, deploying their names mainly as signatures, rather than engaging seriously with their thought. We manage to bounce from Marx to Kant (a backward revolution if there ever was one) on to Denis Dutton, in a series of moves seemingly culled, in their utter banality, from a calendar of daily quotations.

But maybe the most problematic of Wilkinson’s propositions is contained in the section titled, “Mutually Beneficial Exchange is Natural.” This assumes that exchange within the capitalist system is always equal. If that were the case, Marx would never have found it necessary to write one sentence of economic philosophy. (Unequal exchange is a specter haunting much of Western literature and thought—you need only look at the opening of the Iliad, whose narrative begins with this very issue.) But somehow in Wilkinson’s free market fantasy, exchange is both natural and equal.

This short account of the naturalness of capitalist systems, bolstered mainly by a superficial engagement with evolutionary biology (and every other discipline to which Wilkinson turns his hand), runs completely counter to the narrative presented by Naomi Klein, who can produce her own corpses. No wonder Wilkinson takes such issue with it.

I'm not 100% sure on the banking regulations, but there tends to be a correlation between social democracy and increased regulation on the whole. And its not just the levels of regulation but the impact of the whole system on the wider society. Eg. more equitable incomes may increase poorer households abiltiy to repay loans, it may lead to a smaller subprime market, socialised health costs means that there less costs on households, we need to look at the impacts things like this may have on economic and social outcomes.

You mock yourself with your answers.

Now once again Friedmanism has brought the economy to it's knees and everyone is a Keyensian again.

This comment shows how uninformed you are. You simply have no way of coherently explaining what this means. Considering how entrenched Keynesianism is in so much of economic policy making, your statement is right off the bat incredibly preposterous. Keynesianism abounds.