The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That is Remaking the Modern World.

Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw 

Simon & Schuster, $26, 447 pp.

Shortly before he died, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin commented in an interview: "Where is there an active Left now? In Latin America, maybe; maybe in Korea. When I was young, there were left-wing leaders in England - Laski, Cole, Tawney. Where are they now? Ou sont les neiges d'antan? It is the first time this has happened for two hundred fifty years."

The rise and fall of the political Left since the midnineteenth century is, in many ways, the story of a shifting consensus on practical economics. Radical intellectuals, even as late as the French Revolution, gave relatively little thought to questions of wealth and property; Francois Babeuf, the revolution's "Gracchus," was one of the few proto-Communists in its ranks. The revolt against royal authority in America was led by a conservative propertied and professional class.

The notion that equality of possession is prerequisite to equality of rights became radical doctrine only after the violent upheavals of 1848, when Marx began to weave disparate strands from Hegel, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and others into a grand synthesis that became the charter for the intellectual Left for the next hundred years.

The evident failure of the capitalist system in the 1920s and 1930s seemed the final vindication of the Socialist idea. Private enterprise led to monopoly, war, colonialism, and the immiseration of the working classes. Economics was too important to be left to the blind and violent whims of a "market" that was usually rigged in favor of the rich anyway. Whether the state should direct the economy was rarely questioned: the challenge was merely to find the right tack between Stalinist bludgeoning and less intrusive modes of Keynesian guidance.

For at least a generation, centrally directed economies appeared to be the world's most successful, leading to a considerable crisis of confidence in America, the country most resistant to Socialist ideas, especially after the Soviet Sputnik launch in 1957. But the political Left allowed its cause to become so tightly tied to specific theories of economic organization that it was exposed and vulnerable when Socialist economies started visibly lagging about twenty years ago; and then the last remnant of true believers were put to ignominious flight by the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989.

Surely, this is the stuff of grand narrative, a project for a writer with the flair and intellectual sweep of a Hugh Thomas or a Paul Johnson. Daniel Yergin, who won a Pulitzer for The Prize, a history of the quest for oil, has the credentials for such a challenge, and Commanding Heights' splendid title - taken from Lenin's description of the government's place in the economy - raises hopes. (The name of the second author, Joseph Stanislaw, a business associate at Yergin's consulting firm, is in much smaller type, so one must assume that this is Yergin's book.)

Sadly, Commanding Heights' ambitions far exceed its powers. Instead of grand narrative, we get a dutiful compilation of potted little economic histories of almost every country in the world - or at least it feels that way. There are six-and-a-half pages on Poland, a page-and-a-half on Czechoslovakia, three pages on Bolivia, two on Chile, three on Argentina. China gets a whole chapter to itself, and Russia most of a chapter, although there is more on India than on China and Russia put together. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore each get a couple of pages; Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the Philippines a few paragraphs.

Every story is essentially the same. Once all the best people were Socialists or Communists, or at least believed in a strong, directive, economic role for the state. Now they don't, and everybody is much better off. Or if they're not better off, as they demonstrably are not in Russia, they surely soon will be. Along the way, we get snippets of intellectual history - Keynes vs. Hayek, Milton Friedman and the Chicago School monetarists descending on Chile - everything blurred and forced into the same freeze-dried package.

The narrative is clouded with much irrelevant detail, of the kind that case writers dredge up to give a faux immediacy to business-school textbooks. So a section on India opens with "Manmohan Singh was due for lunch at friends' in New Delhi on June 21, 1991. That very morning, however, his wife called up the hosts to say that they would have to cancel." What a coincidence, being appointed finance minister on the very morning you are scheduled to have lunch with friends!

There is little real analysis. What caused the 1980s developing-country debt crisis? ask the authors, and respond fearlessly: "Growing debt, rising interest rates, and falling revenues." They describe the great French U-turn of 1983. Francois Mitterand, after years of grassroots effort, succeeded in rebuilding the Socialist party and led a left coalition back to power in 1981, promising a decisive "break with capitalism." Two years later, amid rising unemployment and inflation, Mitterand recanted and stood aside while his finance minister, Jacques Delors, engineered a French version of a Thatcherite turn to the right. "In fifteen frenetic months, Delors began the great task of modernization that his successors would carry on."

But just a few pages later, we are told almost as an aside that "in 1982, French Socialists feared crossing the threshold of 2 million unemployed. In 1997, the number is over 3 million. Among school dropouts, the rate of unemployment is 29 percent." Shouldn't the authors have something to say about that? Is the great experiment working or not? How do you tell? In the same vein, isn't it just a bit early to opine that "Tony Blair's great accomplishment was to fuse social-democratic values of fairness and inclusiveness with the Thatcherite economic program"?

Intellectual consensus is always a danger signal, and the self-satisfied preening over the triumph of capitalism probably means that we are on the brink of some huge, unforecastable explosion. Compare the "end of ideology" theorists of the early 1960s, and John Kennedy's famous 1962 declaration that there were no ideological issues left, "only technical problems, administrative problems." A first-rate analysis of the kind that Yergin and Stanislaw have attempted would make fascinating reading. Too bad that it is still sorely needed.

Charles R. Morris, author of American Catholic (Times Books, 1997), is completing a book on financial innovation and risk.