Liam Murphy has written a fascinating and thought-provoking biography with clarity, scholarly integrity and panache! Dr Declan M Downey lectures in early modern diplomatic history and co-directs the BCL law with history degree at University College Dublin. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of History, Madrid, in 2009. How Capitalism Destroyed Itself: Technology Displaced by Financial Innovation, William Kingston (Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2017), 174 pages. The argument of this book is clear, persuasive and frightening. The premises and steps of the argument are as follows: (1) Capitalism has been hugely significant in the generation of wealth that has allowed many millions more people to live decent lives for longer. (2) At the heart of the creativity of capitalism has been the paired achievement of securing independent property rights and ensuring through legislation that property rights are exercised for the public good. (3) Constrained property rights facilitated a series of technological innovations which contributed to wealth creation. (4) Propertied interests have succeeded in capturing the law-making powers of government and have freed property from the constraints that obligated it to serve the public good. (5) This law-making power has been used to extend to the holders and generators of moneythesamerightsaccordedtheholdersandgeneratorsofothercommodities. (6) Consequently, the investment in technological innovation which might have saved capitalism has instead been diverted to financial innovation. (7) The consequences of these changes have been growing inequality, the crises of the banking and credit systems, austerity politics and the popular revolt of voters and tax payers. The conclusion drawn is that our democratic regimes are caught in a bind from which there seems to be no escape. They are in hock to the financial interests that fund parties and candidates, and at the same time they depend on popular support that they attempt to purchase with the promise of transfers in benefits and welfare payments. Each step of the argument is supported by referenced literature, but one author in particular provides inspiration and shape to the argument. Joseph Schumpeter’s analysis of business cycles and of the stages in economic Studies • volume 106 • number 423 381 Autumn 2017: Book Reviews development structures the history of capitalism as it is told in the first two chapters of Kingston’s book. Schumpeter’s suggested stages are shown to have support in other accounts in the literature. More critical for the argument of the book, however, is Schumpeter’s prognosis that the capitalist system was bound to self-destruct as it shifted towards a socialist type system of welfare provision via transfers. To an extent, the book reads like a vindication of Schumpeter, whose ideas have long been disregarded and even ridiculed by those who celebrated the triumph of the western liberal system over communism with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the years following 1989. The celebration may have been premature. After all, Schumpeter did not predict the failure of one system and the success of the other. Rather, he pointed to dynamics within capitalism that were changing its very nature from within, and leading it to self-destruction. There are some similarities with Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s selfdestruction , but Schumpeter does not rely on the same economic analysis as Marx. The labour theory of value (with labour as the exclusive source of surplus value), the declining rate of profit as labour is replaced with machines and the tightening competition for credit among entrepreneurs are not elements of Schumpeter’s analysis. Instead, at least on Kingston’s reading, the focus is on the innovations which enabled the emergence and development of capitalism, and on the structural changes which have shifted government’s role to protecting the interests of those already benefiting from the existing generation and distribution of wealth, while blocking the sources of innovation that could deliver solutions and further development. The analysis is not a purely economic one but sees the role of cultures, ideas, and politics as intrinsically linked with that of economics. The contrast with a crude version of Marx is noted: ideas, for example, stand alone as sources of energy and are not simply the by-products of productive activity. Kingston’s emphasis...