Adam Tooze on how to fix American capitalism (and democracy)

Our 2020 How To Fix Democracy series is focused on the thorny and tangled relationship between capitalism and democracy. And there are few better people of untangling this relationship than the Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze. So here’s the transcript of my conversation with Adam about American capitalism and democracy.

Andrew Keen: Our Second Series of How to Fix Democracy is focusing on the relationship between capitalism and democracy. And one of the world’s leading authorities on contemporary capitalism is Adam Tooze. He’s a Professor of History at Columbia University and Head of the European Institute there. So, Adam, to kick off this conversation let me throw an easy question at you: How would you define capitalism?

Adam Tooze: I think of it — capitalism as a term which we use to do work for us, which has had shifting meanings across time. My academic colleagues who are heavily invested in this will argue that it’s also about whether or not you think of capitalism as being defined by the emergence of market structures. That would go back to the Medieval period or before and it would extend across the entire world. Or whether you think of capitalism as being defined by a set of class relationships, basically between people who own capital and those — the vast majority of humanity who don’t. And a social order based on that…