The nature and logic of capitalism.

THESE HAVE BEEN boom years for Adam Smith's "other" book. In 1976, Irving Kristol wrote an essay, "Adam Smith and the Spirit of Capitalism," which reminded people that Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments serves as a companion to his 1776 tract on economics. People like George Gilder and Michael Novak have since offered their own moral defenses of the free market. Between those who give capitalism two cheers--who believe that the market makes freedom and thus morality possible--and those who give it the full three--who believe that the act of development is itself noble--you've got an impressive chorus justifying capitalism on moral and not just "practical" grounds.

So when you see Robert Heilbroner's book The Nature and Logic of Capitalism, ou've a right to anticipate a juicy tussle. A response to all this pro-market ethology from an eminent critic of capitalism is just the thing to keep the mind occupied during dull stockholders' meetings. Imagine the disappointment, then, when it becomes clear that Robert Heilbroner has argued himself into irrelevancy.

The first whiff of a letdown comes from the index. No mention of Gilder, or Novak, or Kristol, or just about anybody else who's been heard from in the past decade on the side of the market. Mark gets good ink, as do Freud, Schumpeter, and some of heilbroner's like-minded academic coleagues.

Then there's the prose, with sentences like, "Thus it seems to me that the failure to accord the centrality to one principle and its embodying institutions--not, of course, the same ones for all social formations--robs social analysis of its clarificatory potential as gravely as the dogmatic insistence that all attributes of any given society can be explained as mere epiphenomena of its mode of production or of any other organized structure." The mind glides over such writing, and you're a couple of pages past before you realize that there's been nothing to latch onto. It's impossible to write about the real world with language as aloof as Heilbroner's.

It is possible, however, to write about an irrelevant world that way; Heilbroner does so. In the Heilbroner world, capital is domination, both because it gives the capitalist power to deny workers the "resources of society" and because the desire to acquire wealth is "inextricable" from the desire to acquire power. The capitalist "rules" all that his money touches and uses government as an agent for his greed. The state, virtually a puppet, cannot really influence the flow of capital; the distinction between the private and the public sector is mere pretense because the former could not exist without the latter. Driven by the "magalomania" and "narcissism" of capitalist acquisitiveness, market societies will be helpless against competition from state-planned economies (Europe) that "cope" with such problems as inflation and technical disruptions.

Capitalism's fall is not pretty. Economics is a form of social engineering. It leaves no role for emotions, so that in market economies people avoid emotional involvements. Free-market competition is a Hobbesian war of all against all within which behavior is judged amorally. The group that competes most skillfully feels that it embodies "the spirit and mission of the society that in fact it dominates."

Dear Mr. Heilbroner, please come back to earth. The rent is due.

This is an encapsulation of Heilbroner's observations, but not a caricature. The connection between the world in this book and the world we all eat lunch in is obviously obscure. Anybody reading the papers during the past couple of decades knows that far from capitalists' dominating the state, the state has increased its power to dominate capital. In a world where managers spend half their time warding off law suits by people they have been forced to dismiss, it is hard to see how bosses rule the workers. When the House Ways and Means committee produces a tax-deform bill that beats the stuffing out of industry by hiking up the cost of capital, it is hard to see how the state is a puppet of the moneyed classes. When Washington is full of middle-class powerbrokers, it is hard to see why anyone would take the most difficult route to the power loop--through industry. When religious participation seems to be at an all-time high, it is hard to see how the market breeds amorality. And when the suggestion is made that our economy will be squashed by the European semi-planned economies, well . . . come now.

In reality, democratic capitalism has been marked by a huge power vacuum that capital cannot fill (because of the abundance of choice) and that the state tries to fill. The well-structured government is distinguished by its restrictions on political power. What remains, of course, is individual power and individual freedom. The struggle to justify and preserve that freedom is what rejuvenated the boosters of capitalism.

Michael Novak writes a newspaper column. Irving Kristol appears in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere. George Gilder writes frequently for magazines like this one. Their arguments, while frequently moral, deal with the facts and the day-to-day. They're in the ring throwing leather. Mr. Heilbroner is back in the gym jabbing at mirrors. His book does not contain one memorable factual statement, or one bow to everyday experience. Is it no longer possible to argue against the free market in the manner of a newspaper column?