Boldly written and brimming with new insights on every page, this is not your grandfather's old and staid intellectual history. Boldizzoni takes us through a fast-paced history of capitalism's failed doomsayers--only to then explain why they clearly underestimated its elongated life expectancy and stubborn durability. A superb intellectual history of how people have (wrongly) predicted and imagined the end of capitalism from the time of Marx until today.--Eli Cook, author of The Pricing of Progress
Foretelling the End of Capitalism is an essential book for anyone interested in intellectual history and political economy. It will play a major role in current debates on capitalism and its future, as well as on crisis and crisis theory.--Wolfgang Streeck, author of How Will Capitalism End?
Francesco Boldizzoni shows how predicting the collapse of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. He illuminates a tradition of economic thinking that has justified do-nothing posturing in the name of revolution, and how it resists learning lessons of its own failures. This book is also a brilliant study of the cult of forecasting.--Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
This beautifully written book captures the peculiar complicity between hope and disappointment that characterizes prophecies about the end of capitalism over the last three centuries. It will be of great interest to readers, both as a cautionary tale about prophecy and as a model study of the logic of capitalism itself.--Arjun Appadurai, New York University
